


Spite The Dying Of My Light

by Banach_Tarski



Series: M-Theory [3]
Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Aliens, Alternate Universe - Grand Theft Auto Setting, Body Horror, Depression, Fake AH Crew, Implied/Referenced Torture, Interrogation, M/M, Minor Character Death, Multiverse, Quantum Mechanics, Science, Science Fiction, Serious Injuries, Time Loop, alternative universe characters major death, minor appearances from other people at Rooster Teeth, string theory
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-26
Updated: 2019-08-28
Packaged: 2019-09-27 21:14:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 49,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17169512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Banach_Tarski/pseuds/Banach_Tarski
Summary: “What do you do when your enemy is stronger than you, and faster than you, and smarter than you? It’s something I’ve been having a bit of a problem with the last few years. But someone very near and dear to me found an answer.”Geoff smirked.“Have more friends.”Even advanced alien technology has its limits.Geoff can go anywhere in the multiverse but he can’t go back.“Fuck.” Geoff said. “Oh, Geoff, what have you done this time?”





	1. Type 1 – Closed Strings

Geoff’s phone buzzed in his pocket. His eyes flicked to Jack but the other man didn’t look up.

He discreetly read the message under the table and put his phone away.

“Geoff?” Jack asked. Geoff schooled the most neutral expression he could onto his face. “What is it?”

“Burnie’s waiting outside,” Geoff said casually, “Something important came up with Funhaus. Shouldn’t take too long to sort.”

“Do you want me to come with?”

Geoff shook his head. “Nah, I’ll be right. I can probably fix it before we leave for Gus’s.”

“Oh, you’re just going to bow out of all the party planning?”

“I’ll be twenty minutes, not two hours.”

Geoff managed to stand up and leave the room before breaking out into a grin. It was difficult for him to maintain a measured pace to the front door but he did, and he didn’t run into any of the others on the way.

It took the last bit of Geoff’s patience to close the door gently behind him. Once it was shut he was a giddy mess and he turned to Burnie expectantly, who was leaning against a wall with one foot resting against it and he looked just as excited.

“You’ve got them?” Geoff asked.

Burnie fished a small flat box out of his jacket pocket. “John Mace got them to me like an hour ago. He did some great work with the alien metal alloy and now they’ve got this green sheen to them when the light hits right.”

“Gimme.”

Burnie handed the box over and Geoff opened it quickly, checked the contents, and stuffed it into a back pocket, sparing a glance at the front door as he did.

He frowned.

“How did they end up green?”

“You’re asking me like I have a clue,” Burnie replied. He kept his voice low. “Mace just said it bonded well with the platinum.”

“I like it. I like it a lot.”

“You’re stressing.” Burnie said. “You’re stressing about the green-“

-“No, I really do like the green-“

-“The party then? Or the thing with Gus-“

-“Maybe it’s all three things!” Geoff said in a loud whisper. He looked at the ground. “There’s so much to do, and it has to all go perfectly, and do you know how many what-if scenarios I’ve gone through in the last couple of weeks?”

Burnie leaned in close.

“For the record, Geoff,” Burnie said, “I think what you’re doing is great.”

“I _really_ hope so. Better try while you still have the chance, you know? We’re not old but… I’m definitely older than most people in this line of work.”

“Not just with your crew,” Burnie continued, “In the city too. What you’ve done, no-one else could do. You’re a good man, Geoff. I’m sure you’ve got many years left.”

Geoff smiled. “I had a lot of help getting here.”

“Yeah, you’re surrounded by good people. But you were the one that fought so hard for co-operation when those new crews emerged. And now Kinda Funny and Cow Chop are actually discussing plans and sharing resources. It wouldn’t have happened if you didn’t make things go so smoothly with Funhaus.”

“I got real lucky. There were a few bad apples at Funhaus that needed weeding out but most of them, they’re not different from us. We want the same thing, and we care about the same people around us.”

“Co-operation’s always worked for you.”

Geoff smiled again, mostly to himself. “It really has.”

“And talks are going well with that new crew too, who were they, Sweet Pine? The whole nature of the game’s changed. You’ve made things _better_.”

Geoff gave a watery laugh, and hugged Burnie. “I couldn’t have done it without you and your amazing ability to put up with my bullshit. You’re a fantastic friend, and I love you, and…”

Geoff broke down a little bit.

Burnie hugged him tighter. “I’m so proud of who you are and where you are. You’re making some really good calls, and I know a lot of people trust you to make the right ones.”

Geoff sniffed. “Just you wait until you see what I’ve got planned next.”

They broke away.

“The party’s tomorrow, right?” Burnie asked.

“Yep. Yesterday it was three years since we met Jeremy, and tomorrow I’m three years sober. Doing a combined sort of affair.”

“I’m looking forward to it. And after, if the six of you want to take some time off-island, just let me know beforehand so I can organise people to cover you.”

“Will do, as long as Gus doesn’t blow the entire island up first.”

“That’s why you and the rest of them have to make sure he doesn’t.”

“I think I would much rather plan parties than try to stop Gus from doing something he doesn’t want to.”

“I’ll let you get back to it. I’ve got some planning for this party to do as well, you know.”

Burnie gave him one last clap on the shoulder and they said their goodbyes. Geoff wiped at his eyes, took a deep breath, and headed back inside.

 

* * *

 

“I’ve made up my mind, Geoff.” Jack said. “We’re inviting Sugar Pine.”

“Haven’t we left the invite a bit late for them?” Geoff replied.

“I’ll get Trevor to tell them.”

“Hah. I wonder how many of these last minute decisions we can offload onto Trevor?”

“I’ll see what I can do. But Lindsay wants final say on the music.”

“Like we could stop her. We’ll be listening to teen angst songs all night.”

Ryan walked past with his head down in his phone. Gavin trailed after him.

“I’m a plenty good photographer!” Gavin argued.

“You know who’s even better? An actual photographer. I know one who owes me a favour.”

“I’ve never even heard of this Wes guy!”

“Think of it like this. You get to spend more time with us instead of worrying about what to put on our Instagram.”

“But I like worrying about what to put on my-“

Ryan pressed a finger over Gavin’s lips. Gavin looked scandalised.

“Do it after.” Ryan said, and only then withdrew his finger.

Gavin blushed.

“I might be, amenable to that.”

Ryan smirked.

Geoff’s phone buzzed once more and he smiled at the screen.

“Oh good,” Geoff said, “catering just finished setting up the tables and chairs and the flowers look phenomenal. I didn’t know my yacht could look this good.”

“Yes you did,” Ryan said. He rubbed a hand over Geoff’s shoulder and Geoff leaned into the touch.

“Okay, yeah, I did.”

Before Ryan could withdraw his hand, Geoff placed his own over it and tilted his head backwards to look at him.

“Wanna go for a run tomorrow morning?”

“Sure. But don’t think I’m gonna let you beat me up the top of that hill again.”

“Oh, you let me, did you?”

Ryan kissed the top of his head.

“We’ll see tomorrow.”

The front door banged open and Michael and Jeremy pushed their way inside.

“Here, Gavin,” Michael tossed a Blu-ray on the couch, “I don’t know why we couldn’t stream it, but I got your dumb ghost hunter show.”

“Ready, Set, Ghost is a gift.” Gavin said, kissing him as he walked past. He did the same for Jeremy.

“I got snacks!” Jeremy held up some shopping bags. “And I’m trying out my air fryer tonight. We’ll watch Ready, Set, Ghost and eat the best goddamn chicken burgers you’ve ever seen.”

Jack raised an eyebrow at them. “You’re meant to be helping prepare for the party. Why did it take you three hours to get snacks?”

“We had to steal a jet ski, Jack.” Jeremy replied.

“Oh, of course.”

“Besides,” Michael said, “I thought Lindsay did most of it a month ago. We’ll get Trevor to do the rest. Aren’t we headed to see Gus in like twenty minutes?”

“Shit, yeah, we should get ready for that.”

 

* * *

 

“Did you bring it?” Gus asked.

“Yep, Michael has it.” Geoff replied, and pointed to Michael, who hefted the laser cannon up into a ready position. “And the shield and the last of the pellet storage containers are in the car.”

Almost every piece of alien tech made its way to Gus’s basement over the last three years. Gus would occasionally request a new piece to do some research on, and Geoff and Burnie had obliged. Pretty much the only things left in the apartment were the modified guns and the helmet, which hadn’t left the supervisor’s storage box. The box sat deep in a storeroom protected with the heaviest lock Geoff could find.

Lindsay, somehow, had also ended up with a red and black piece of tech that apparently did nothing, but it looked like it was meant to unfold into something. She refused to let Gus study it and it sat on top of her microwave.

The pellet storage containers that Geoff future-cubed from Zancudo had been filled to the brim, and while they tried to use the pellets sparingly, their numbers dwindled. The focus of Gus’s research over the last year or so was concerning the pellets.

And he’d better have something good to show them, otherwise the Fake’s edge over the city might soon end, as well as the talks with new crews trying to share pieces of Geoff’s territory. Their futuristic tech was one of their main advantages and without it there wasn’t much to stop these crews attacking them on a dozen different fronts.

There was a third reason for the party tomorrow. Many of the leaders of the other crews would be attending and Geoff wanted them to meet and talk and mingle. If all went well, it would do wonders for relationships between them.

The Fakes couldn’t afford to look weak at a crucial junction like this.

“Good,” Gus said, and wiped a hand over his eyes. He looked tired, even more so than usual. His hands were blackened with some sort of ash and he left twin streaks of it down his face. “We might need it to do some damage control.”

“The laser cannon is like, the opposite of damage control.” Michael said. “This is damage out-of-control.”

“If the machine goes critical, we’ll need the cannon to destroy it before it destroys us.” Gus explained. “I’m pretty sure it won’t, but…”

Michael levelled his gaze at Gus. “But you do have proper shut down procedures in place? Manual off switch? Grounding wires?”

Gus pointed at the cannon. “That’s my shutdown procedure. Look, can you just take those pellet storage containers downstairs? I have a few things to get ready before I’ll perform the experiment.”

“No, no,” Ryan said, “this isn’t an experiment. This is a demonstration, right? You’ve done the experiment before?”

Gus pretended not to hear him. “Can you bring those pellet storage downstairs? Also, I need someone to help me find some stuff upstairs. Gavin? Jeremy?”

Ryan and Jack carried the two remaining pellet storage contains into the basement, where the experiment was set up, while Gavin and Jeremy helped Gus upstairs. Michael took a phone call out by the car and, when Ryan and Jack left to see what was taking Gavin and Jeremy so long, left Geoff in the basement by himself.

Most of the space was taken up by high-tech clutter. The x-ray glasses, the invisibility suit given to Burnie, a couple of guns, and tech Geoff didn’t recognise sat in a neat pile on the left, and the right contained the mound of twisted and damaged scrap alien metal that had collected there over the years. On various tables sat technology that hadn’t been found useful yet- the devices that only existed when viewed from the correct angle, stuff too fragile and burned to experiment on, and broken tech Gus was still trying to piece together.

Geoff recognised the “rocket launcher” Ryan attempted to fire at Prince James when Jeremy and Ryan had investigated that scientific research outpost. There had been about half a dozen raids since then at various locations, most of them turning up scrap metal but a few contained useful pieces of tech.

Even Jeremy’s old device sat on a table, slowly gathering dust right next to the experiment Gus had concocted. Geoff would have recognised it anywhere. Even just glancing at it made Geoff uncomfortable, the sight of the thing brought back more bad memories than Geoff could handle. He focused on the experiment beside it, giving the table a wide berth.

The experiment consisted of some sort of high powered laser and a bunch of mirrors made of polished alien metal. Geoff was careful to avoid touching any of it, partly because he knew these set-ups could be delicate and mostly because he knew how often alien tech reacted with contact.

Next to it were the five remaining pellet storage containers. Three looked worse for wear while the two Ryan and Jack brought down looked brand new. There had been plenty more, Geoff knew, but they’d now joined the scrap heap on the right side of the room.

The five pellet storage containers were set against the wall in a neat row. Geoff lined himself up in front of them and cleared his throat.

He didn’t speak, but his mouth moved over the ghost of words and they felt well-practiced in his mouth. He palmed the thin box in his pocket and held it out like a present to them, still mouthing the words he’d gone over so many times he couldn’t forget even if he tried. He smiled, and put the box back in his pocket.

Just in time, because Gus and Ryan came down the basement stairs with a whiteboard between them. Closely following them was Gavin with an armful of future cubes, and then Jeremy with a table lamp he’d clearly just unplugged from somewhere.

“So what do you guys know about the fourth spacial dimension?” Gus asked.

Jeremy answered. “Not much, to be honest. It’s there, and we can’t access it because our brains are dumb.”

“Yes, that’s fairly accurate.” Gus replied. He and Ryan placed the whiteboard down next to the experiment just as Jack and Michael made their way down the stairs and into the basement with them. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t still use it. Give me the lamp, please.”

Jeremy passed it over and Gus plugged it into a power point, talking all the while.

“We can’t use the fourth spacial dimension ourselves, but we can see what it does in our three dimensions. You’re all familiar with Ray’s abilities to disappear and walk through walls?”

“Uhh, yes.” Geoff said. “We’re the ones that told you about that.”

“He learned how to use that extra spacial dimension. It has rules, it follows patterns, and it’s predictable. Once we know what those rules are, we’ll know how it works and looks and go from there.”

Jeremy cocked his head. “How do you learn the rules and patterns n’ stuff if you can’t see it?”

Gus smiled. “Reverse engineering.”

“You… reverse engineered a dimension?”

“I’ll show you. Give me a cube, Gavin.”

Gavin passed a future-cube over. Gus shined the lamp light directly over one of its surfaces, leaving a shadow on the whiteboard.

“Look at the cube,” Gus instructed. “Look at the shadow. When I shine the light over one of its surfaces, what do you see?”

Geoff stared at the whiteboard. There was a square-shaped shadow on the surface, as well as the shadow of Gus’s hand.

“A square?” Jack said hesitantly.

“Yes. The light and the cube make a square-shaped shadow on the white board. Now look what happens if I rotate the cube…”

Gus slowly made the cube rotate a quarter revolution, so he was holding it by its corners. “What does the shadow look like?”

Geoff didn’t follow. Fortunately for him, Jeremy did.

“It’s hexagon now. The shadow’s a hexagon.”

“And if I rotate it further, it’ll turn back into a square. The shadow is a square and then it turns into a hexagon and back again.”

“Very interesting.” Jack said. “But I don’t know what this has to do with anything-“

-“It has everything to do with everything, Jack.” Gus said. “Imagine you were a little two dimensional being living on that whiteboard. You wouldn’t know what a cube was. If I told you a cube made that shadow, you’d think a cube was a square that could magically turn into a hexagon and back.”

“But you could explain what length, width, and breadth were-“

“But you wouldn’t comprehend it. I can tell you, the three-dimensional Jack, about how four-dimensional space works. It’s just length, width, breadth, and gargleflardth.”

“…Oh.”

“We’re the simpler beings living on a whiteboard. The aliens are twisting the cube.”

“Ah.” Ryan said. “and their tech is the cube.”

“Exactly. I’ve been looking at a lot of pellets as they fly through space,” Gus said. “Checking off what things they fly through, what they won’t. Checking angles, looking at things in slow motion. Thanks for that camera, by the way, Gavin.”

“As long as I get it back eventually.” Gavin replied.

“Eventually.” Gus promised. “I’ve built up a pretty good picture of how these things should move in four dimensions. And if I get enough energy to move in the same way, at the right time, through the right materials… I think it’ll turn into a pellet.”

Michael gave an appreciative whistle. “You can build pellets out of their shadows.”

Gus shrugged. “I could be completely wrong. Shadows can be misleading. But that’s why you’re all here- just in case I am. But the numbers all add up and initial testing has been promising.” He pointed at some of the scrap alien metal. Several of the pieces on the top had holes burned through them, and scorch marks.

Was that promising? Geoff reminded himself that he trusted Gus, something he’d often had to remind himself of whenever Gus asked them to visit his home.

“Alright,” Geoff said, clapping his hands together, “when can we start the experiment, or demonstration or whatever?”

“As soon as you all put on these safety glasses, I can start powering the laser up.”

Gus fished six pairs of glasses out of various pockets and made them put them on. Gus himself slipped on the x-ray glasses.

“Do you need us to, uh,” Ryan said, “stand back or anything?”

“Just out of the way of the laser. Okay, I’m turning it on now.”

Without any more warning, Gus flipped a switch on the back of the laser and a brilliant violet light shot out. Geoff’s eyes caught on the dust motes trapped and illuminated on the beam before following the beam’s course between each mirror.

It hit a prism of some sort and split into two beams- one red and the other cyan. They travelled along separate paths, bouncing across mirrors, and convened on a speck in the middle of the display. There was a flash of light, and the beams combined into a bright mass.

Gus shut the laser off. The violet light, and the red and cyan, disappeared in an instant.

What remained was the new pellet. It wasn’t the same bright cyan of the pellets Geoff was used to, nor was it the pink of Ray’s. It was at most a dull grey with a vaguely purple sheen, but it shone with the same bright intensity. Whether it did something similar to the other two types of pellet Geoff didn’t know, but this was something he could definitely show off at the party tomorrow.

“It worked!” Gus said animatedly. “I knew it needed those nanodiamonds!”

“I don’t know that you did,” Jack said, “But that’s a pellet right there. The wrong colour, but then again so were Ray’s.”

Ryan removed his glasses and inspected the pellet. “Ray’s pellets went through organic matter and hit inorganic stuff. I wonder if the colouring affects how they travel through different kinds of matter…”

“Nanodiamonds?” Gavin asked.

“Man-made diamonds, but very small.” Gus explained. “It matched my theories perfectly. It’s not technically a nanodiamond, it’s slightly too big, but it held the light perfectly. Next time I’ll try adjusting the prism a little bit and seeing where that takes us, I reckon a more pure light division will get us a more saturated colour.”

“…Okay. Sounds good.”

Gus ignored Gavin’s indifferent response. “If the nanodiamonds worked, that means a couple of my other theories are likely true. Gavin, how sure are you that you’re only three-dimensional?”

“Oh God.” Gavin said. “No, I do _not_ want to know, thanks very much. I need another existential crisis from you like I need a hole in the head.”

“Stop scaring him, Gus.” Geoff said. “Can we bring this pellet on my yacht for the party? I imagine it would be too difficult to set up this experiment on the boat but can we transport it?”

Gus frowned. “I want to run some tests on it, but I don’t see why you couldn’t transport it the… usual…way…Uh oh.”

“Uh,” Michael said, “the pellet’s not looking too good.”

The pellet shook, each tremor across its surface growing more pronounced with each second that passed.

That’s right. The pellets exploded if they weren’t stored in freezing cold conditions.

“Get down!” Jeremy tackled Ryan, the closest to the experiment, to the floor.

Geoff had enough time to throw himself backwards before the pellet burst apart in a flash of grey light.

Geoff clattered against the table behind him just as razor sharp shards of polished alien metal bit into his arms. It stung, and Geoff was glad he hadn’t taken his safety glasses off.

His arm brushed across Jeremy’s deactivated device.

There was a flash of red light.

 

* * *

 

Strings.

Hundreds of them, thousands, millions, billions, trillions, more than Geoff could comprehend, an infinite number of them vibrating and tangling and writhing in and out of tandem. Cyan lights and lengths masquerading as atoms and structures and fundamental forces, splitting and dividing and merging together in a pattern unknown to anything resembling what Geoff had seen on Earth so far.

Geoff didn’t like it one bit.

“What? No!” Geoff screamed into the cyan void. “No, the device was turned off. I _saw_ Ray tear it apart.”

Despite his argument, he remained. A body, floating in a void, eerily similar to the space Ray described after touching the first device.

“Fuck.” Geoff said. “Oh, Geoff, what have you done this time?”

His voice echoed without walls, and yet it also felt like he was speaking directly into his own ears. It was disconcerting.

Geoff took a deep breath.

“Okay, you turned on because I touched you. Okay. Okay…”

How had Ray gotten out of this?

His description was almost three years ago, and Geoff could barely remember it. Thinking about the words Ray choked out on the deck of his old yacht was still painful.

“Ray had talked to you, right? And you responded?”

Ray said the device sat on his arm like it looked like it meant to. There was no device here. Geoff was alone, more alone than he ever recalled feeling before. Was that because he wasn’t tied to the device in the same way Jeremy was? Might still be?

“Please, can you take me home? Can you take me back to the others? Their names are Jack, Ryan, Michael, Gavin, and Jeremy. Can you bring me back to them? Please, we have a lot of stuff planned…”

The void offered no answers for him.

Geoff threw up his arms in frustration, grimacing at the same time. He didn’t like how his arms felt, the way he could feel each muscle group contract and relax. He could feel his blood trickle out of his arteries to mix with the cells in his fingertips and then travel back up his arms.

He tried talking to the void again, mostly to focus on something else.

“Well why am I here then?”

There was a flash of light, and Geoff _saw_.

Geoff saw Los Santos fade away above him, as if he’d fallen through the ground. It shrunk and shrunk until the island, and then the whole planet was no more than a tiny speck, and when Geoff tore his eyes away from the sight he stared directly into the mass of the Sun. There were no words to compare the size of it to the Earth, let alone Geoff. No human being had ever felt so small. Even the Sun appeared as a speck to the girth of other stars as they appeared and shrunk in front of his eyes. Geoff smelled burned meat and iron so strongly he could taste it on his tongue. Slowly, the full splendour of the galaxy, his galaxy, spread before him. He couldn’t pick out his Sun against such a starscape. It may as well not have existed at all.

Geoff saw himself fall against a table in Gus’s basement, his left arm trapped in a device he hadn’t seen before.

Geoff saw himself standing on a vaguely familiar mountain. He watched as he pulled the trigger on an alien rifle, and a cyan pellet tore its way through the sky. It impacted against a spaceship and it fell out of the sky, hitting another, and one tumbled down the mountain while the other spiralled away.

Geoff saw himself standing on a vaguely familiar mountain. He watched as he pulled the trigger on an alien rifle, and a cyan pellet tore its way through the sky. It impacted against a spaceship and it fell out of the sky, hitting another, and one tumbled down the mountain while the other spiralled away.

Geoff saw himself standing on a vaguely familiar mountain. He watched as he pulled the trigger on an alien rifle, and a cyan pellet tore its way through the sky. It impacted against a spaceship and it fell out of the sky, hitting another, and one tumbled down the mountain while the other spiralled away.

Geoff saw himself standing on a vaguely familiar mountain. He watched as he pulled the trigger on an alien rifle, and a cyan pellet tore its way through the sky. It impacted against a spaceship and it fell out of the sky, hitting another, and one tumbled down the mountain while the other spiralled away.

Geoff saw himself standing on a vaguely familiar mountain. He watched as he pulled the trigger on an alien rifle, and a cyan pellet tore its way through the sky. It impacted against a spaceship and it fell out of the sky, hitting another, and one tumbled down the mountain while the other spiralled away.

“Woah, what?” Geoff said. He blinked. “Is this déjà vu?”

Geoff saw himself standing on a familiar mountain. He watched as he pulled the trigger on an alien rifle, and a cyan pellet shot through the sky. It impacted against a spaceship and it fell out of the sky, hitting another, and one tumbled down the mountain while the other spiralled away.

Geoff saw himself standing on a familiar mountain. He watched as he pulled the trigger on an alien rifle, and a cyan pellet shot through the sky. It impacted against a spaceship and it fell out of the sky, hitting another, and one tumbled down the mountain while the other spiralled away.

Geoff saw himself standing on a familiar mountain. He watched as he pulled the trigger on an alien rifle, and a cyan pellet shot through the sky. It impacted against a spaceship and it fell out of the sky, hitting another, and one tumbled down the mountain while the other spiralled away.

“Stop it!” Geoff said.

He felt the cyan void form around him again as the images faded.

“Why did you show me that last scene so many times?”

Geoff saw himself standing on a familiar mountain. Mt Gordo. He watched as he pulled the trigger on an alien rifle, and a cyan pellet shot through the sky. It impacted against a spaceship and it fell out of the sky, hitting another, and one tumbled down the mountain while the other spiralled away.

“I get it! Stop!”

Geoff floated in silence for a while, deep in thought.

“That situation… it’s inevitable, right?”

Geoff saw himself standing on Mt Gordo. On his other side, Geoff saw himself standing on Mt Gordo. On his other side, Geoff saw himself standing on Mt Gordo. On his other side, Geoff saw himself standing on Mt Gordo. A kaleidoscope of Geoffs pulled a hundred triggers, and a thousand spaceships fell against a million mountains, and a billion spaceships spiralled away.

“That hurts my eyes… and my brain.”

Geoff gasped.

“That’s the start of this, isn’t it. The start of it all. It’s me. Every single universe… it’s me. I caused alien technology to appear in Los Santos and near Prince James.”

The void was silent.

“But how? Why-?”

Geoff saw a device, the original device, held loosely in Gavin’s hands in Geoff’s old yacht. Geoff remembered that as the moment they’d become the Fake AH Crew and Gavin had set off the device. But Geoff watched, and Gavin had stopped messing with the device to talk about crew names. Unprompted, the device lit up on its own.

Why was the void, or Jeremy’s device, showing him this?

Geoff saw the same device emit a red flash as Ray held it.

Geoff saw Jeremy’s device appear to deactivate when Ray tore apart its insides.

Geoff saw that same device flash red just as his own arm brushed against it.

“I don’t understand.”

Geoff saw Gus hold a future cube up against the strong light of a lamp, and saw him mouth something.

What was it Gus had said? Some fancy metaphor. Geoff didn’t remember.

The scene repeated again, still without sound. Maybe this was because Jeremy’s device was so damaged? Maybe it just didn’t do sound. What had Gus said?

“Aliens twist the cube. Aliens control the cube. The cube is the tech. Aliens…”

Oh.

“The reason all this happened. It wasn’t me. It was _you_.” Geoff didn’t know who he was talking to. The void, Jeremy’s device. An alien. All of them.

“ _You’re_ the one making these devices do stuff! It’s not us!”

Geoff narrowed his eyes.

“You made this happen. All of it. And you want me to do something now. You made Ray leave, and now I’m your next target.”

Geoff saw himself standing on Mt Gordo. He watched as he pulled the trigger on the rifle, and a cyan pellet shot through the sky. It impacted against a spaceship and it and hit another, and one tumbled down the mountain while the other spiralled away.

Geoff was quiet for a while.

“There’s something on my arm in all of these. From the second vision. I… leave this place, and then I get that cube device thing put on my arm. And then I, dunno, time travel? I thought time travel wasn’t real. You make that new cube thing take me somewhere and I continue the cycle. That’s what you want me to do.”

Geoff paused.

“God, we’re just… one more loop in an infinite chain. Is that what I am to you?”

The memory of the sheer enormity of space stretched out in his brain. Geoff was one tiny piece in an unfathomable, unknowable, infinite universe. One of many. One of an infinite number.

And he would leave this place, and fall against Gus’s table, and he would be sent to Mt Gordo.

He would continue the cycle.

As sure as a glass dropped would smash on the ground, the cycle would continue.

“…I think I understand now. I don’t know why _I_ have to, but I’ll do what I’m told.

“And when I do, will that be the end of it? Can I finally just live after that? With the others?”

Geoff felt his mind vibrate apart and he disappeared in a red flash, his final questions unanswered.

 

* * *

 

Geoff re-emerged in Gus’s basement in a flash of light. His knees buckled, and he instinctively reached out to break his fall. Something cold passed through his left arm and he collapsed on the floor.

“Geoff!” Gavin cried out.

Geoff stared at his arm and the new cube-shaped device that encircled it. He looked up.

“I’m sorry, I-”

He saw Ryan reach out for him, but the world unravelled and there was nothing for him to reach out to.

 

* * *

 

It wasn’t instantaneous.

Geoff felt his mind and body dissolve into infinite tiny strings. He held onto whatever scrap of himself he was allowed to keep and waited for Mt Gordo to appear.

It didn’t. Something felt wrong.

Something tugged at his insides, ripping him in a different direction.

* * *

 

Geoff opened his eyes and stared into Geoff’s.

“What?” Geoff said.

“What the fuck?” Geoff said.

“Holy shit.” Jack exclaimed.

“He just came out of you!” Ryan said, and pulled a gun.

“ _What?!_ ” Geoff shouted, and scrambled away from Geoff. “Shoot him!”

“Don’t shoot me! Why would you shoot me, Ryan?” Geoff said.

“He knows your name!” Geoff shouted once more.

“Can we calm down, please?” Jack said, raising a placating hand to Ryan. Ryan lowered the gun.

Geoff looked at his arm. The cyan cube-like device was actually a cube within a cube, and the two cubes… well, rotated around each other wasn’t the right description. It looked like they took turns swallowing the other. As he watched, the motion slowed down and stopped. It faintly glowed purple.

What he’d said in the void had turned out to be true. The cube thing had taken him somewhere. But this wasn’t where he was meant to be. This wasn’t Mt Gordo. And there sure as hell shouldn’t be another Geoff here.

But they seemed to think that _he_ was the other Geoff.

“I’m not meant to be here,” Geoff said. “I’m meant to be at Mt Gordo right now.”

“Mt Gordo?” Geoff said.

“Something went wrong.” Geoff explained. “Jesus Christ. Look, this is as weird for me as it is for you, but I can explain everything. Hopefully. Just get the others and I can do it all in one go.”

“Others?” Ryan questioned.

“Get Michael, Gavin, and Jeremy. I’m sorry I disappeared so suddenly but there’s something I have to do. I don’t know why he’s here.” Geoff pointed at Geoff. “Like I said, something went wrong.”

“Me?” Geoff said. “I was here all along! _You’re_ the one that appeared out of _me_!”

Geoff gave him a patronising look and held up his left arm. “Obviously there’s some alien tech fuckery happening. Just get the others and we’ll go see Gus and figure this out.”

“…Alien tech?” Jack said. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Ryan raised his gun at Geoff again.

“There’s no-one else here but us.” Ryan said in a low voice. “So you can just sit right there and start explaining everything here and now.”

Geoff noticed he was back in his apartment. It was late at night, and a light snow fell.

It wasn’t meant to snow for another few months.

“You don’t remember Michael, Gavin, or Jeremy?” Geoff asked. “You don’t know about the alien tech?”

The barrel of Ryan’s gun pressed against Geoff’s temple.

“No more questions. You explain why there’s two of you right now or I bring that number back to one.”

Geoff broke out into a cold sweat, and his stomach dropped. Ryan wouldn’t really shoot him, would he?

“You don’t know who or what I’m talking about at all.”

There could only be one explanation.

“No” Jack said. “Well, there’s a Michael and a Gavin in the Lad’s crew. Are you with them?”

“No. Look, hey, Ryan, could you put the gun down please? I’ll talk if you stop pointing that at me.”

Ryan looked to Geoff, who nodded.

“I’m you,” Geoff pointed at Geoff, “from another universe.”

“Are you evil?” Geoff asked.

“What? No,” Geoff said. “Well, no more evil than you I suppose. And you have no idea what I’m talking about when I talk about alien tech? Have you three ever gone to Zancudo?”

“Nope.” Jack said. “There was a job a few years ago to go in there and bring something back, but we decided it was too risky.”

“Well, I’m from an alternate universe where you went.” Geoff said. “And we ran into the Lads and got stuck down there, and, well, ended up getting into a six-way relationship.”

“Yeah, right,” Ryan said. “You honestly expect us to believe that?”

“How else are you going to explain the two Geoffs?” Geoff asked. “You know what, Geoff, I’m going to start calling you Alt-Geoff.”

“What?” Alt-Geoff said, annoyed. “But _you’re_ the one from the alternative universe!”

“Not to me.” Geoff said. “But it doesn’t matter. I’m going to head back to my universe now and set this straight.”

“No,” Ryan said, “You’re going to explain-“

-“No I’m not. I don’t have time to sort this out. More important things to do.”

Geoff grabbed one of the cube’s edges and tugged it, setting it spinning. The cubes glowed and the spinning sped up.

Obviously something went wrong the first time the device was used. He was surprised he could get it going himself but it definitely looked like it was powering up. He’d just use it again and hopefully the right thing would happen and he’d end up at Mt Gordo.

The alternative was too painful to consider.

“Bye.” Geoff said. “And watch out for any visiting royalty!”

With a flash, the world disintegrated and Geoff was no more.

 

* * *

 

Geoff opened his eyes and stared into Alt-Geoff’s.

“What the fuck?” Alt-Geoff said.

“Shit, this isn’t right. It felt wrong again.” Geoff said quickly, trying not to panic. “Don’t worry, I’ll be out of your moustache momentarily.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Ryan said, pulling a gun, but Geoff was already spinning the cubes and the universe dissolved.

 

* * *

 

Geoff opened his eyes and stared into Alt-Geoff’s.

“What the heck?” Alt-Geoff said.

“Moustache?” Geoff said.

“What?!”

“The other Alt-me had a moustache,” Geoff explained. “You don’t. That’s a really big change, Jeremy said once.”

“…Uh. What?!”

Geoff spun the cubes and the universe dissolved.

 

* * *

 

“What the fuck?” Alt-Geoff said.

 

* * *

 

“What the fuck?” Alt-Geoff said.

 

* * *

 

“What the fuck?” Alt-Geoff said.

 

* * *

 

Geoff opened his eyes and gasped, because instead of staring into his own eyes he opened them to darkness.

Dirt filled his open mouth and Geoff spluttered and clawed at the space in front of him. His hands hit open air and Geoff lunged forward. The dirt slid away from him and Geoff scrambled away from it.

Chest heaving, Geoff’s eyes darted over the hole he’d just crawled from. Just visible were the grey shapes of several bones.

A grave. Geoff had crawled out of a grave.

“This isn’t right.” Geoff said, voice shaking.

“This… none of this should be happening. I should be at Mt Gordo. I have to get to Mt Gordo!”

He should be in Gus’s basement. He should be with the others. He should be at a party, showing off exciting new tech. He should be…

Heart racing, Geoff tried to think.

…If what the first Alt-Ryan said was true, then Geoff appeared from inside an Alt-Geoff somehow. That would imply the bones he was currently looking at were his own.

He’d just crawled out of his own grave.

Geoff leaned to the side and threw up.

Geoff rolled away from the mess and leaned on one elbow, suddenly lacking the strength to stand or even sit. Stones and twigs prickled his skin, making him itch. He was next to a storm drain under a road. The air smelled dirty and polluted.

This was all wrong. None of this should be happening. Not today, not with the party happening, not at all.

Something caught Geoff’s eye.

Next to him, the ground sloped up again into another mound. Next to it, four more.

Five more graves.

One for each of his crewmembers.

Geoff wanted to be sick again.

“This can’t be happening.” Geoff muttered to himself. “I have to get back. My crew is probably worried sick. They’re waiting for me to get back.”

A thought struck Geoff.

If he appeared inside an Alt-Geoff somehow, if that was how the cube-device handled two Geoffs existing in the same universe, then how could he appear back in _his_ universe? There was no Geoff to appear in.

Geoff shook his head.

No. There had to be a way back.

“Take me back!” Geoff screamed at the cube device. He grabbed at an edge roughly and yanked it.

The edge snapped off. The thin piece of cyan metal clattered between some rocks and fell out of sight.

The device powered down, losing its purple glow.

“No, no. Wait, no,” Geoff stammered, his anger fleeing him in an instant. “Hold on, hold on.”

He scrambled for the dropped piece but he didn’t see where it fell. It might have even fallen in the storm drain itself.

Geoff collapsed to his knees.


	2. Type 1 – Open Strings

He found it.

It took him two hours, but he found that missing piece. It did in fact fall into the storm drain and Geoff had to lever the grate open with a stick. Geoff thanked his lucky stars that it didn’t appear to have rained recently in the area; otherwise he’d probably never have found it.

He manoeuvred the piece back into place and it settled in its spot loosely.

The cube-device fluttered weakly to life and Geoff shot up straight. The piece fell out again and Geoff scrambled to catch it before it disappeared between the rocks.

“Okay… okay.” Geoff said. He slipped the piece into his pocket. “I can fix this, but I need some tape or something.”

He wasn’t stuck. He wasn’t stuck here with only his own dead body to keep him company.

These devices worked in four dimensions, right? Maybe he’d only broken three of them. And alien tech was hardy. He was well aware of how well Jeremy’s device had functioned despite looking like it powered down.

Oh fuck. Jeremy’s device still worked.

Would Michael have destroyed it completely with the laser cannon after seeing what it did to Geoff? Geoff hoped so. There was a good chance they’d figured out what happened to him, to some extent. Gus would be able to tell them what tech had gone missing.

Geoff’s thoughts stuttered to a halt.

Was the original device even destroyed? What if the laser cannon only destroyed things in three dimensions? Was the device in tiny little molten pieces, scattered across the ocean floor?

No, because Jeremy killed the Fakes during his loops. He’d have noticed, or mentioned at some point if he’d killed one of them and a few hours later the rest had disappeared in a flash of red light. Or something. Geoff didn’t know what happened in a universe, or to the people connected to a device, once one of them died.

He had to believe that it was possible to destroy the alien devices somehow. After all, there was a bunch of deactivated and broken tech in Gus’s basement… at least Geoff hoped it was.

If the others were smart, they should take the laser cannon and destroy everything in that basement before it did anything else. Then throw the cannon into the ocean.

A shadow fell over Geoff’s shoulder. He spun around, expecting trouble, but it was only the shadow of the mountain behind him growing longer. It was going to get dark at some point and Geoff had nowhere to go.

Geoff looked around properly for the first time. He was in a valley between two mountain peaks, right near a road but so far he hadn’t noticed any cars driving by. There was the faintest of sea breezes tingling the hair on his head, and the smell of salt and rubbish.

Geoff climbed out of the drain and stood near the side of the road, trying to get his bearings. He could see where the drain emptied into a creek at the bottom of the valley. Probably built to stop the road flooding. His eyes followed the path of the road down the valley to where it connected with a major road and turned into a bridge-

Geoff knew that bridge.

Geoff had landed a jet hundreds of times right near it, and parachuted to the base of it. He and the Lads had hidden their vehicles under it before the Zancudo heist.

Geoff looked back at the graves behind him. If he was right about the bridge, they weren’t all that far from Zancudo.

Was it possible that in this universe, they’d all died escaping Zancudo and the military had buried them here?

It was plausible if they needed to cover it all up because of the alien tech. Geoff would bet money this road was used mostly to transport and bury bodies, considering the location. If any body pieces washed down the drain they could be explained away as jumpers off the bridge.

Of course, the Fakes had other enemies that could have done this. But they were all located in the city, and there were easier ways to dispose of bodies than to lug them out here. Geoff knew from firsthand experience.

The easiest way to check if he was right about any of this was to go down to the bridge and see if the vehicles were still there.

Before following the road down to the bridge, Geoff jumped back down into the drain and reburied his bones. It wasn’t right to leave them out in the open like that, even if the process filled him with a sort of horror he couldn’t properly describe.

It took him about an hour to make it to the base of the bridge. It took him a further ten minutes to find the right clump of foliage to remove as the whole area was far more overgrown than he remembered. He couldn’t tell how much time had passed since he was last here.

Moving some bushes aside, he finally spotted his Roosevelt. It looked rusty, and had some weather damage, but it wasn’t a complete wreck. Geoff smiled to himself.

Leaving it for the moment, Geoff travelled a little further through the overgrowth. Under some more detritus sat the Lads’ vehicles. Michael’s armoured car, Ray’s brown monstrosity, and Gavin’s shit-heap of a motorbike. Geoff ran a reverent hand over the hood of Ray’s car.

The times he had with Ray were definitely golden days gone past- but he knew his time with Jeremy and the other Fakes right now was also a golden age. He couldn’t imagine a better universe where Jeremy wasn’t there. It just didn’t seem possible.

Frowning for a moment, Geoff dug into his pocket and pulled out his keys. Brushing a bit of dirt off, he walked back to the Roosevelt and unlocked it. His car key worked.

He had his keys in his pocket.

Hmm.

Geoff sat in the driver’s seat and pulled everything out of his pockets. His phone and wallet, a pack of breath mints, the piece of the cube-device, a spare magazine, and the thin box had all made the journey between universes with him. Reaching behind, he pulled his Glock out of his waistband.

That raised some interesting questions about what the cube-device was transporting between universes. This new device worked significantly differently to the original device.

Geoff unlocked the boot from the inside and rummaged around inside. There was a bug-out bag, a gas can, and a few guns and explosives neatly lined up against the back wall. He opened the bug-out bag and rifled through it until he found some tape.

“Good. Now I can fix this stupid thing.”

Geoff tugged at the cube-device but it didn’t come off his arm. It didn’t appear to be attached in any way he could see- it just hung over his forearm, right near his wrist. He shook his arm but all that did was send the cubes spinning around each other again. To no useful effect.

“I’m getting pretty sick of this fourth spacial dimension bullshit.”

Trying to hold it steady, Geoff fit the broken piece in place and managed to wrap the tape around the join. He did the same to the other side and it held steady. He gave the device a cautious spin and the device began to glow.

“Fuck yes, Geoff, you’re a genius.”

The glow was weak, almost too weak to see, but was he imagining it getting stronger? Probably if he waited long enough, it would power up enough for him to use.

What did he want to do until then? It was extremely unlikely that any of these vehicles were in a good enough condition to drive. The batteries would be long dead and the fuel gone bad. Geoff didn’t know much about body decomposition but he imaged he’d been buried a few years at least. He wouldn’t put it past the military to speed up the process somehow to hide the evidence quicker.

He pulled his phone out of his pocket and was unsurprised to find he had no reception. In this universe, he wouldn’t have paid his phone bill in years. That probably meant his credit cards were cancelled as well.

Awww, his apartment would’ve been found abandoned and sold by now. He’d liked that apartment.

He had about $400 in his wallet. That could last him a shitty hotel for a week or so or until the device powered up. He could carjack someone on the bridge above him and go from there.

And go where?

Despite the Gent’s deaths, he imagined Burnie and Rooster Teeth still surviving out there. He’d give Burnie quite the scare, literally rising from his grave after who knows how many years, but it would be nice to see a familiar face.

But Burnie wouldn’t be able to help him. He’d have to explain the whole thing and that would be difficult enough. And afterwards, Burnie wouldn’t be able to help him much. Nobody in this universe would.

Besides, it wasn’t really _Burnie_ , was it? Just someone who looked and sounded a lot like him. It was a Burnie who moved on without him years ago. They had different histories now. Geoff didn’t particularly want to see what happened to the Burnie of this universe, this darker, colder one.

One he’d leave in a few hours or days anyway.

No, Geoff decided, he’d sit here and wait for the device to fix itself. It already looked brighter than fifteen minutes ago. He slipped the tape into a pocket, for safe-keeping, and settled down to wait.

 

* * *

 

As soon as he opened his eyes he saw the fractured piece fall away again. It seemed like the piece won’t stay attached permanently- he’d have to retrieve it and wait for the cube-device to reboot and fix itself each time.

That was the price he had to pay for his moment of anger.

At least he wasn’t trapped in a universe where everyone he loved was dead.

“What the fuck?” Alt-Geoff said.

Geoff, despite himself, (or maybe because of himself,) grinned.

“Thank God, it worked.”

Ryan levelled a gun at him.

“You planned this? You came out of him! Why are there two of you?”

“It’s good to see you too, Ryan.” Geoff said. “Oh my God, I’m going to have to explain this every time, aren’t I?”

Geoff felt a momentary pang of sympathy for Jeremy.

“Who the fuck are you?” Alt-Geoff said.

“I’m you from another universe. I use this-“ Geoff held up his wrist- “to travel between universes, and right now it’s broken. If you’d give me a few minutes I can fix it right up and head on my-“

-“You’re not going anywhere.” Ryan said darkly. “If you honestly expect us to believe that for one second, you must think we’re idiots. Did the Lads put you up to this, whoever you are?”

“I’m not a Lad spy, I’m Geoff.” Geoff explained slowly. “I appeared inside of the other Geoff. I come from a universe where the Lads and Gents joined together and work together now.”

“Oh really.” Jack said.

Geoff decided to take a page out of Jeremy’s book.

“Yes. And I can prove it, too. I know pretty much everything about them, and you three as well.”

Alt-Geoff and Jack shared a look, but Geoff was paying more attention to the gun in Ryan’s hands.

“Oh, put the gun away, you’re not going to shoot me.” Geoff said.

“You don’t _know_ that.” Ryan argued.

“Yes I do, Ryan, because I know you, and you wouldn’t shoot me in a million years. The only reason you haven’t put your gun away is because you like the notion that you’re unpredictable and you hate that I-“

Geoff was right. Ryan didn’t shoot him, but he did clock him over the back of the head with the gun, and Geoff saw stars. Ryan and Jack tackled him to the ground and subdued him.

Okay, maybe Ryan had grown softer in the years he was in a relationship with Geoff and the others… this Ryan clearly hadn’t. He felt his arms drawn roughly behind his back and bound, and Jack’s hands search him. Jack emptied his pockets and took the contents.

But his hands passed through the cube-device, Geoff felt.

“I can’t take the glowing thing off.” Jack said to Alt-Geoff.

“Leave it, then. Bring him downstairs.” Alt-Geoff instructed. “If he knows anything about the Lads, Ryan can get it out of him, can’t you?”

“Of course.” Ryan confirmed.

Geoff spat out a mouthful of bile and grimaced. He shot Alt-Geoff a dirty look as he was hauled downstairs. Alt-Geoff stared back with a grim but resolute look in his eyes.

 

* * *

 

“You know,” Geoff said to Ryan, “You’re basically going to be torturing your boss, right?”

Ryan faced away from him, his eyes on a table towards the far side of the room, and shook his head.

“My boss is upstairs, and you’re just his doppelganger with the info we need to stop the Lads once and for all.”

“Are they that big of a problem for you?”

“Ever since their sniper ended up dead and they hired that mercenary from the mainland.”

Geoff suspected the new guy was Jeremy. These universes were similar in a lot of ways.

Geoff also suspected these Gents were the reason Ray was dead.

“Was all of this _really_ necessary?” Geoff questioned. He was zip-tied to a chair in a room near the garage of the apartment building. “You could have, I don’t know, asked me about them? We didn’t have to jump straight to this. I want an ice pack, at least. My head hurts.”

There was the sound of metal scraping along stone. Ryan was sharpening a knife.

“We stopped with the niceties when the Lads murdered Burnie and Gus. Now, you give us answers, and you get to live a little longer.”

Geoff felt a pang of grief shoot through him. He had to remind himself that it wasn’t his Burnie and Gus. His Burnie and Gus were safe. There were no Corpirates, no Princes, and no enemy Lads left in his universe.

It wasn’t difficult for Geoff to think of this Ryan, though, as different. Not difficult at all.

Maybe it would be harder for this Ryan to make that distinction between the two Geoffs.

Geoff worked to stay still in his chair and avoid straining to see what Ryan was doing. He had a plan, and if he wanted it to work, he’d have to appear unafraid of this new Ryan and way more sure of himself. More in control.

Fortunately, when it came to Ryan, it was an area Geoff had a lot of experience in.

“Now,” Ryan said, and briefest flash of the blade was visible when it hit the light, “You’re going to tell me who and what you are, and what that thing is on your arm, and then you’re going to tell me everything you know about the Lads.”

“Ryan Haywood, I’m your boss. Except, maybe, I know a bit more about you than he does.”

“Oh really?” Ryan said absentmindedly.

“Yep. For instance,” Geoff leaned back in his chair, “I know you’re deeply in love with me.”

The knife-sharpening noises stopped. Ryan turned around.

Geoff let a slow smile spread across his face.

“I’m not-“

-“You are.” Geoff cut him off. “And you’re in luck. I’m completely in love with you too.”

Ryan gave Geoff a long look.

Geoff continued. “We’ve been dating for almost four years. You were sure that Jack would be the one for me, and you took a little bit of convincing otherwise. Some people have more than _the_ one.”

Something flashed across Ryan’s face, although he quickly buried it. Geoff pressed on.

“You’ve wondered since you started working with us, why would two good men want to hang around you? You’re the Vagabond. You were a broken mess before you met us. What could we see in you that you couldn’t? And over the years, we showed you. Your loyalty. How you could make the two of us laugh. How carefully you looked after the things you cared out, whether that be your houseplants or your crewmembers. All the different ways you could be gentle. The way we completely relaxed around you because we trusted you.

“There was that time you fell asleep on Jack’s shoulder and he didn’t move until you woke up. Or when I looked after you when you broke your leg. We were kind, even when you felt you didn’t deserve it. And you loved us for it.”

Ryan flushed, embarrassed. The knife dropped from his hand and clattered on the floor, unnoticed.

These facts his own Ryan had whispered to him on the rooftop late at night, only a few days after Ray left and they both needed assurance. Ryan had plucked the bottle from his hands and curled around him like a blanket. They talked until Geoff was too tired to keep his eyes open and Ryan all but carried him into bed. He was still awake when Geoff woke up late the next morning, looking at him like there wasn’t anything better to in the entire world.

The rest of the crew had been out dealing with urgent matters at the time, and it was something Geoff had kept private between him and Ryan. Now this Ryan knew, and it felt like a betrayal.

But he would say anything to stop himself from getting carved up and to protect the Lads of this universe. This Ryan clearly believed him about the other Gents, but to protect the others he needed to show it wasn’t just him, Jack, and Ryan.

“A situation occurred when we were fighting the Lads in Zancudo. We got stuck down there with them for quite a while. How you feel about me and Jack, you extended that to the Lads. We were stuck for a _long_ time, you have to realise. I’m not your enemy. The Lads don’t have to be your enemies. And I can prove it.”

Ryan looked at him with wide eyes. “How?”

“Go back to the penthouse and look at my phone’s lockscreen. That should be proof enough.”

Ryan pulled the phone from his pocket and turned it on.

Alright, that saved some time.

The screen lit up and Geoff watched an expression of pure pain cross Ryan’s face. It wasn’t an explicit photo or anything, but it was a reminder of what was or what could have been. Could still be.

“You’ve been alone a long time, Ryan.” Geoff said. “But you can end that today. There’s nothing stopping you from letting them know.”

“I… wait here.” Ryan pocketed the phone and darted out of the room, locking it behind him.

Geoff’s head fell against his chest. He took a deep, heaving breath.

“Okay, good… good.” Geoff said to himself.

The adrenaline bled from him and he slumped in the chair. Hopefully Ryan had gone upstairs to explain the situation to Alt-Geoff and Jack, or at least start trying to see if his feelings are returned.

That should give Geoff enough time to break out of here.

The zip-ties weren’t in the best position to simply break out of- Geoff couldn’t get enough leverage. His arms were secured to the chair arms and he couldn’t get himself in a good enough position. He could, however, bend over and chew at the restraints. He couldn’t imagine that being all that great for his teeth but within a few minutes he had a sizeable dint in the restraints for his left hand.

Clenching his hand and ripping it forwards, the zip-tie snapped. Geoff did the same for his right hand and soon enough his hands was free.

If he fell forwards out of the chair, he could reach the knife Ryan dropped. Scraping it towards him with his fingertips, Geoff grabbed the knife and freed his legs.

He was out of the chair, but not free yet.

Geoff looked around. His journey down here was blurry, but the room looked very similar to the one he had in his own apartment complex. It hadn’t been used since they brought Jeremy in and he left them there for three hours. The thought of using it since then had turned Geoff’s stomach, so they’d converted it into a storage room.

But before that, before the Lads had moved in and given them some suggestions on improving the security of the room, it was unlockable from the inside by a pin-code very similar to the one on their front door.

This room had that same old setup. All he had to do was remember the pin and he could leave.

“Shit.” Geoff said quietly to himself. How was he supposed to remember a pin he’d invented five years ago?

Geoff input Jack’s birthday. 0-1-0-3.

The door didn’t open.

“I’m a fool.” Of course they would have changed it since then.

Well, they might not have.

He didn’t remember picking any pins but he did remember how he’d rolled his eyes at Jack’s suggestions to change the pin every month. He knew he’d forget them. Jack insisted they do it for the front door and Geoff had relented.

If only Jack were here. Even better, if Geoff were back with him.

Geoff remembered the first pin for the front door, now that he was thinking about it, and decided that was a good a guess as any. He tapped away at the pin pad.

4-3-6-8, which spelled out GENT.

The door beeped and swung open.

“Genius, Geoff.”

Thankfully there was nobody else around in the garage. Geoff spotted his Roosevelt and a sports car that looked like something Jack would like. One of them would make an excellent get-away vehicle, probably the Roosevelt because Geoff had a key that he knew unlocked it.

It was upstairs, with the rest of his stuff. As well as the edgier Gents of this universe.

Geoff had one knife.

Hopefully Ryan had done his job and convinced the other Gents Geoff and the Lads weren’t enemies. Geoff couldn’t leave without that piece of the device, and he wanted his other belongings too, but he didn’t really believe he could hurt any of the Gents for them. Or, really, that his knife would be much use.

Geoff climbed up the fire escape stairs with only a little difficulty. He was fit, the fittest he’d been in years, but there were still a hell of a lot of stairs to climb and his head throbbed.

It took a couple of tries, but Geoff found the correct password to the front door of the penthouse. He opened it slowly, ready to bolt if anything jumped out at him.

Nothing did. Geoff peeked around the side of the door and saw the main room, as well as the kitchen and dining rooms, were empty. His stuff sat on the dining room table.

Surely, all three of them wouldn’t have left the apartment? They hadn’t because Geoff saw the vehicles. Was it a trap of some sort? It didn’t seem likely.

Geoff grabbed his stuff off the table while he had the opportunity. The broken piece of the device still sat on the floor- probably unable to be picked up by anyone but him, if Jack’s earlier words were to be believed. Brandishing his Glock in front of him, he performed a quick sweep of the rooms around.

He stopped when he saw the door to the master bedroom shut tight.

Ah.

Geoff put his gun away and walked back to the dining room table. He patched up the device, made a sandwich from the contents of the fridge, and wrote a quick note saying he was gone. He also included some details about the Lads he hoped they’d use in good faith.

It was the least he could do for the group of people who were happy to torture him for information less than an hour ago, no matter how familiar they seemed. They could figure the rest of the Lad situation out themselves.

Geoff was going to wait out the time until the device charged somewhere sunny, probably the Del Perro Pier. No way was he waiting around here.

Geoff picked up the Roosevelt car keys and headed towards the elevator.

 

* * *

 

The world vibrated into focus and Geoff blinked into Alt-Geoff’s wide-eyed expression.

“Um,” Alt-Geoff said.

“Don’t worry,” Geoff said quickly, “I’m you, just from another universe. Please don’t shoot me.”

“I’m not gonna- why would I shoot you?” Alt-Geoff asked, recovering from his shock.

“It’s not a warning for you, it’s a warning for-“

Geoff looked around. He was on his old yacht, sitting on the floor next to the bar. Alt-Geoff sat alone on a barstool, a drink in his hand. There was no-one else around.

“Where’s Ryan?” Geoff asked.

A heavy look cross Alt-Geoff’s eyes. He took a long sip of his drink, eyeing Geoff carefully.

“You’re really from another universe, aren’t you.”

Geoff held up his left arm. The tape around the device’s broken piece had held this time around, and already the device was powering up again.

“Is he dead?”

“No, but… he left. Long before Ray did. Look, what are you doing here?”

“Trying to leave. I’ll be out of your hair in a few hours. I can explain everything. So do you remember that Zancudo job-“

“-Wait, you may as well explain it to everyone at once. I’ll get the others. Hey Jack? Gavin, Michael? Come over here!”

There was a distant shout from the other end of the boat. Alt-Geoff took another long drink.

“You don’t sound too… concerned about another you from a different universe visiting.” Geoff said.

“You’re not the weirdest thing to happen around here. Alien tech bullshit, I imagine.” Alt-Geoff replied.

“How did you know?”

“We’ve had more than our fair share. I don’t think I could possibly forget that Zancudo job. Drink?”

“No thanks,” Geoff said with a practiced ease, “I don’t do that anymore.”

Michael and Gavin were the first to reach the bar area, and when they spotted the two Geoffs they stopped dead.

They looked identical to the Michael and Gavin of Geoff’s universe. Geoff swallowed around a lump in his throat.

“Guys,” Alt-Geoff said, “Meet Geoff, he’s me from another dimension.”

“Hey boys,” Geoff waved at them, “just passing through. But I hear you lot know about the alien technology?”

“Uhhh.” Michael said. “Hmm. Yes. We do. Well, Gus knows more than us.”

“Then I need to talk to Gus as soon as possible.”

Gavin pointed to the device on Geoff’s arm. “Second Geoff. What’s that there?”

“Device that sends me through dimensions. It takes a few hours to charge.”

“Huh.”

Gavin bit his lip. He looked between the two Geoffs.

“Do you know what I’m thinking?”

Both Geoffs sighed.

“Yes, we do.” Alt-Geoff said.

“Unfortunately.” Geoff said. “I’m not cheating on my Gavin with you…” Geoff paused for a moment, thinking. “…Eighth Gavin? Ninth?”

“What if you shagged Geoff? Like, our Geoff. Is that cheating?”

“Excuse me,” Jack said, “but what the fuck is going on over here?”

Alt-Geoff sighed. “I only want to do this once, so we should explain everything with Gus present.”

“Fine with me.” Geoff said. “When can we leave?”

 

* * *

 

“Ryan was wearing gloves,” Jack said. “He never physically touched the device.”

“As much as anyone can physically touch something.” Gus added.

“Yeah, but the device didn’t care about that.”

“So he wasn’t part of the resets?” Geoff asked.

“Nope.” Michael answered. “Took us a little while to figure out how to get him to stop killing Gavin. Ray was smart enough to get behind cover. Then it took a bit more time to get me to stop killing Ryan.”

Gavin curled into Michael’s side on the couch. “For a while every reset started with a showdown between Ryan and me. Took us what, a dozen resets to sort out what was going on? Then Geoff and Jack found a way to talk him down.”

“We pretty much did what you did in your universe,” Michael continued, “got out, killed the Corpirate and all that, created the Fakes, and Ray had his experience with the device. Ryan left the very next day. He wasn’t going to be in a crew when he hated half of them.”

“Is he still active around here?” Geoff asked.

“Yep.” Alt-Geoff said. “But he won’t work with anyone anymore. Not even us. I think he felt betrayed, like Jack and I chose the Lads over him. In a way, I guess we did.”

“We changed and he didn’t.” Jack said. “I don’t blame him at all for leaving, but I miss him. We all do. We looked for him after Ray left, Gus managed to track him down, but then everything with Jeremy happened.”

Geoff almost spat out his coke. “That happened here too?”

“Did you end up brainwashing foreign royalty to avoid being assassinated by his guards?”

“Yep. But where’s Jeremy then?”

“He left too. Straight after. Shot himself in the head. Said now he knew how to save us, he had to do it for us in all the other universes too.”

A melancholy silence fell across the room.

“My Ryan killed a scientist before we ran into the Lads, in Zancudo.” Geoff said. “He took a glove off because it was covered in blood and he was with us for all of the resets. Him and Jeremy did some exploring together after getting info from The Inconvenience and accidentally contacted Ray. He was able to help us confront Prince James, gave Jeremy some advice, and we haven’t seen Ray since. That was three years ago.”

“So,” Alt-Geoff said quietly, “Your Ryan’s still around then? And Jeremy?”

Geoff nodded. “We ended up doing what you four’re doing, just with six. In my universe, Ryan loved the Lads as much as Jack and I. Here, I have a picture-“

Geoff froze, the blood draining from his face.

“You alright there?” Gavin asked.

Geoff rummaged through all his pockets, but he knew it was gone.

“My phone. I left it in the other universe.”

He slumped boneless against the couch.

“Great, now that’s gone forever. I didn’t get it back from Ryan.”

“We can get you another phone-“ Alt-Geoff started, but Geoff cut him off.

“I don’t have any photos of them anymore. I mean, I backed them all up but…”

“But they’re not here.” Jack finished.

“They’re not.”

“We’ll get you back to them.” Alt-Geoff promised. “Or to the right Mt Gordo. Whatever you need.”

Geoff sat up straight. “I need Gus to tell me everything about this device on my arm. I need to learn how to control it and get back to where I need to be.”

“Come on then,” Gus said, “We’ll talk downstairs.”

 

* * *

 

Gus’s basement looked a lot like… Gus’s basement. Tables were set up to hold various pieces of alien tech, and there was an experiment set up against the far wall. But while Gus’s basement was filled with alien tech, both active and destroyed, this Gus’s basement was almost bare. Geoff recognised the invisibility suit from one of the ED-Garde, and quite a few alien guns. He saw one completely busted pellet storage container, but that was it.

“Where’s all the stuff from Zancudo?” Geoff asked.

“You mean the laser cannon and the shield?” Michael clarified. “We keep them at the penthouse.”

“No, I meant the stuff from the second time. The pellet storage containers, the future cubes, you know. Or what about the alien tech from Prince James’ research outposts? The other one of these?” Geoff pointed to his left arm.

“…Second time?” Gavin said. “What do you mean second time?”

“Did you get stuck in Zancudo again?!” Alt-Geoff exclaimed.

“No! But Jeremy took us back to get pellet storage containers. For the guns? So we could take out the ED-Garde?”

“That’s not how we did it.” Michael said. “Jeremy convinced Colmillo Blanco to turn against Prince James. We separated him from his ED-Garde, used the helmet on him, and then used his alien EMP on the ED-Garde.”

“I… huh. Whatcha do about Colmillo Blanco afterwards?”

“Nothing. We gave them territory along the west coast and haven’t had any major problems with them since.”

“Oh. We uh, we wiped them out.”

“Then how did you handle all the new crews that popped up? We struggled with a lot of them.”

“We made _them_ our allies instead.”

“Smart.”

“If you’re done gasbagging,” Gus interrupted, “Do you want to hear my thoughts on all this or what?”

Alt-Geoff and Geoff raised an eyebrow at him.

“Oh, you love gossip.” They said simultaneously, then looked at each other.

‘Go on,” Jack urged Gus.

“For starters, you can stop calling that thing a cube device.” Gus said. “It’s obviously a hypercube.”

“Hypercube?”

“It’s a fourth dimensional cube. Look at the way it moves- nothing else moves like that.”

“Oh.” Geoff said. “I know that.”

“You… knew.”

“Just didn’t know what it was called, is all. The fact that it worked after I broke a piece off kinda told me that.”

“Just shut up and let me talk for a few minutes, okay?”

“Alright, fine.”

“So this is a fourth dimensional cube. I think it’s attached to some fourth dimensional part of you, okay? You can’t use the fourth spacial dimension so you can’t remove it.”

“You think _I’m_ fourth dimensional as well?”

“Why else wouldn’t it come off?”

“I don’t know. Magnets?”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”

Now that he thought about, Geoff recalled the Gus from his universe saying something about a theory of his that was similar.

Gus moved to a table and picked up something off it. It took Geoff a couple of seconds to place it as Prince James’ sword. Very much in one piece, it glowed a gentle cyan as Gus brandished it.

“Uhhh…” Geoff said, taking a step back.

“Calm down. I have a theory about this sword and this might be the best time to test it.”

Michael took a hesitant step between them. “What are you trying to do, Gus?”

“Previous testing has shown this sword cuts through alien tech- tech that works in four dimensions. If I’m careful, I can probably cut the hypercube off him without hurting his three-dimensional self.”

“What about the part of me that’s fourth dimensional?!” Geoff shouted.

“No human’s ever used it before. You’ll probably be fine.”

“Uh, no.” Alt-Geoff said. “Nobody’s cutting any piece off anyone else here today. Not even in the name of science.”

“Second Geoff,” Gavin said, piping up for the first time, “You said Prince James had research outposts? Is that where you found the hypercube?”

“I think so.”

“How about we check them out and see if we can find the hypercube from this universe? We can do tests with it without anybody getting their fourth-dimensional arm cut off.”

“I don’t want this device off me. I just need to know how to use it, so as long as the testing doesn’t involve that sword… fine. After we beat Prince James, each outpost we found was abandoned. I don’t imagine anyone causing trouble for us if we poked around in them.”

Geoff straightened his back.

“This day just never ends, does it.”

Alt-Geoff looked at his watch. “It’s getting pretty late. Why doesn’t one of us take you back to the penthouse and you get some rest? We’ll check out the outposts.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, it’s fine. You’ve had a rough enough day. Let me take you home.”

“Alright, but let me know as soon as you find something.”

 

* * *

 

It was all Geoff could do to keep his eyes open for the majority of the way home. Alt-Geoff pointed him in the direction of the spare bedroom after Geoff had instinctively walked to the master bedroom.

It was weird, seeing Jeremy’s room once again Ray’s old room, just sparser. Most of Ray’s leftover things had been put in storage, but his old bed and desk remained. As soon as his head hit the pillow he was out like a light.

When he opened his eyes again, it was to sunlight coming in through a window. The room was quite warm. It was probably later in the day than he expected.

He showered, shaved, and when he came back there were fresh clothes waiting for him on the bed. One of Alt-Geoff’s suits, maybe even the exact same one from his universe that he wore yesterday, just one not completely covered in dirt and grime. He transferred his stuff from his old clothes to the new set, carefully checking it was all there.

Glock, spare magazine, knife, wallet, keys, breath mints, tape, and the thin box. Okay. He was ready to face the world.

This kinder one, at least.

The four Fakes were milling about the main area, clearly waiting for him. Jack and Michael played the new Red Dead on the TV while Alt-Geoff and Gavin looked over a pile of alien tech on the dining room table.

“Did you find it?” Geoff asked. Michael and Jack paused their game.

“No.” Alt-Geoff replied. “We found a bunch of tech that Gus is gonna drool over, but we didn’t see any cubes at all. Yes, we checked all the rooms from multiple angles, just in case it disappeared from some of them.”

Michael came over to the dining room, with Jack following along behind. “We also found the location to another outpost, but there was nothing there either. I think it’d been picked clean before us.”

Geoff tried to hide his disappointment but Jack, perceptive as always, saw right through him.

“We’re not out of options. I bet there’s a few more outposts neither of us have found-“

“No.” Geoff shook his head. “If it wasn’t in one of the ones uncovered in my universe, it won’t be in any new ones. That means we found it somewhere else.”

“Where else could you have?”

“I guess the second time I was in Zancudo? I threw a lot of future cubes. It’s not unlikely I picked a few more things up then I intended.”

He didn’t remember seeing it on the table with Jeremy’s device before the experiment. Could the hypercube have stayed in a future cube until the right moment for him to fall into it? Gus brought a future cube downstairs with him to do the shadow demonstration. Had it acted on its own, like the devices did?

Was there anything Geoff could have done to avoid ending up right here and now?

Except he was meant to be at Mt Gordo. Changing universes with the first device wasn’t accompanied with the strong feeling of wrongness, and the ripping sensations.

Whatever was planned for him had gone terribly wrong, and it hadn’t stopped.

He needed something better than another hypercube and Gus’s wild guesses. He needed a helmet. One that wouldn’t melt his brain as soon as he wore it. Something he could use to take control of the hypercube, like Gavin did with the ED-Garde tech.

“I’m sorry,” Alt-Geoff said, “but I won’t ask anyone here to go back to Zancudo.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to either.” Geoff said. “I don’t suppose you’d have any of those alien helmets still lying around?”

“We destroyed both of them.” Michael said. “Okay, well, I didn’t really mean to destroy the Corpirate’s one, but Jeremy said the other was too dangerous to use again.”

“Fair enough.”

“Hey,” Gavin said, and passed Geoff a phone. “I picked up one of these for you. Take a look at the pictures, would you? I know it’s not… what you lost, but it’s what our Geoff said he’d want…”

Geoff nodded his thanks and unlocked the phone. There were three pictures in the gallery. The first one Geoff actually recognised, because it was framed in his master bedroom. It was a shot of the three Gents, shortly before running into the Lads for the first time. Geoff and Jack were smiling into the camera, and a rarely-unmasked Ryan was smirking at them in the background.

The next photo was of the four remaining Fakes posing in front of a new motorbike. Over the bottom of the image a banner read “ _Happy Birthday Gavin!”_. There was some sort of filter over the top.

The last image was of the living room just a few metres away. The top right half of Jack’s face sat in the foreground while Michael, Gavin, and Jeremy played Hitman on the couch.

It wasn’t them. It wasn’t the right _them_. It made something hot and scratchy build in Geoff’s throat. But until he could get back to his own universe, it was the best he was going to get.

“Thank you, they’re perfect.” Geoff said.

His eyes lingered over the photo of Jeremy.

“Did you bury him?” he asked softly.

Gavin shook his head. “Cremated with his device, ashes in the ocean.”

“You cremated his device as well? What happened to it after Jeremy changed universes?”

“He… changed universes and it sort of exploded with a red light. Michael says he thought he saw it split into two, like, make a copy of itself before it did, but nobody else saw it. Shattered into a hundred tiny pieces. We put them with the ashes.”

“Probably the safest thing to do. So that’s what happens in the universe left behind.”

Geoff looked at the device on his arm.

“I don’t think there’s anything more you can do to help me. I should get a move on.”

“You don’t have to leave this universe behind too.” Alt-Geoff said. “We talked it over last night, and if you want to stay, you’re welcome to. We’ll still help you try and get back, but we could definitely use another Geoff. I wouldn’t mind halving my workload.”

Geoff smiled again, showing teeth, but knew the fact he couldn’t accept was written all over his face.

“Thanks for the offer, but I can’t leave my family behind. Speaking of, I reckon you should give contacting Ryan another go. He’s worth the fight.”

Jack nodded. “We’ll try.”

With that, Geoff made his goodbyes, and spun the hypercube into action.

 

* * *

 

Ashes.

Geoff opened his eyes to a world of black and grey and white.

Alt-Geoff’s wild eyes stared back, but he recovered quickly and pulled Geoff to his feet.

“Come on,” Alt-Geoff said with a hoarse voice, “we gotta go, we gotta go,”

“Where?” Geoff said, then coughed.

Michael appeared from the haze, the laser cannon on his arm. Blood poured sluggishly from a wound on his neck. Tears left streaks of wet ash down his white-dusted face.

“Not the sewers.” Michael said. “Buried. We need to get out of the city.”

“Where’re the others?” Alt-Geoff asked.

“Jack didn’t make it. I’m sorry Geoff, I don’t know about anyone else.”

Alt-Geoff stumbled, and Geoff wrapped his arms around his middle. Hauling him up, Geoff pulled him up a curb and he leaned against a building.

Michael recognised Geoff.

“Are you real?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you can help. Our next best bet is Gus’s house. We need to-“

Three helicopters pierced the gloom and whipped the air into a storm. Geoff covered his face and staggered backwards a few paces.

Michael shut one eye, aimed, and released a beam that crossed the sky like a meteor.

It hit two of the helicopters, sending them spiralling towards the ground, as well as the corners of two adjacent buildings. They all fell onto the street with a crash.

The final helicopter released a stream of bullets in retaliation, and Michael fell apart. His body hit the street with a wet splash of blood, a few stray droplets hitting Geoff’s face.

Geoff and Alt-Geoff stood frozen, unable to look away from the corpse.

This might’ve saved their lives as, the helicopter seeing no more movement, moved on.

The dust settled around them once more.

Alt-Geoff collapsed to the footpath, a low, unending keening noise ripping from his throat.

“We have to go,” Geoff choked out.

It wasn’t his Michael.

It _wasn’t his Michael_.

But it was Michael’s tattoos, and Michael’s clothes, and Michael’s phone lying in a pile of rubbish by the curb, and it was Michael’s blood coating the ground and there would be no red flash to make all this go away.

Michael’s laser cannon.

Alt-Geoff had a secure grip on a fistful of Geoff’s jacket. Geoff tugged it free and the pocket tore loose. The breath mints scattered on the ground.

Michael’s laser cannon.

Geoff forced his legs to approach the body. A bit of bone- a vertebrae- caught Geoff’s eye through the rest of the gore.

Michael’s laser cannon.

It fell from Michael’s arm when Geoff pulled it off. A trickle of blood fell out of it. He tried to put it over his left arm but the hypercube stopped it. No point pointing it on his right arm. He wouldn’t be able to aim it well enough.

Geoff’s laser cannon.

He shoved it into Alt-Geoff’s arms.

“If any more helicopters come, you have to fend them off, okay?”

Alt-Geoff stared past him at Michael.

Geoff hauled him up and spun him around until they were eye to eye. Geoff waited until Alt-Geoff’s eyes locked on his.

He repeated himself.

“O-okay.” Alt-Geoff stuttered out. “We gotta go.”

One hand around Alt-Geoff’s waist, they disappeared into the ash.

 

* * *

 

Gus’s house was empty.

At least, Geoff assumed so until Alt-Geoff pointed towards the basement stairs. They made their way down and looked up to the confused eyes of Ryan and Jeremy.

Alt-Geoff fell into Ryan, who caught him before he could fall further.

“Geoff?” Jeremy asked. “What’s going on? Who’s- woah.”

“I’m him,” Geoff said, when Alt-Geoff didn’t reply. “from another universe. Passed through at the wrong time. What the fuck’s happening out there?”

“King James happened.”

“What?”

“He’s bombing Los Santos.”

“Did you see the others?” Ryan asked, but his eyes became downcast when he saw the cannon on Alt-Geoff’s arm. “You’re the first Fake we’ve seen since it all started.”

“Jack’s dead. I don’t know how. We saw Michael get cut in half by a shot from a helicopter. I’m sorry, I don’t know how to say that any easier. They’re both dead. We haven’t seen any others.”

Jeremy curled around Ryan and Alt-Geoff, holding them close.

“It’s my fault.” Alt-Geoff said. “Everyone’s dead because of me. It’s over.”

His legs gave out. Ryan struggled to support his suddenly limp weight. A hand fell to his stomach and came away red.

“He’s been hit by something.” Ryan said. “Come on, help me lay him out on the table.”

Only the faintest of tremors in his voice gave away how he felt.

Jeremy sniffed, but helped him. Together they laid him out and Jeremy lifted up his shirt and grimaced at the wound.

“What do we do, Ryan? Jack’s dead. Oh _fuck_ , Jack’s dead.”

“Please, Jeremy, I need you here. Focus for me, okay?”

“Okay, Ryan. What now?”

“We need pressure, here and here. Can you find something clean to press on the wound?”

“I’ll look around.”

Jeremy brushed past Geoff and it jolted Geoff from his stillness. He had to help. How could he help? His covered in dust and ash, and he didn’t have near enough medical training for Alt-Geoff, considering the amount of blood that was now dripping out of him.

Water. Gus kept a bunch of water bottles in his laundry. Geoff bolted up the stairs and carried back with him as many as he could. He passed one to Ryan, who began to clean the wound.

“Thank you.”

“Ryan,” Geoff said, “Why is this happening? Why does your Geoff say it’s his fault?”

Jeremy returned with some white shirts and a first aid kit.

“James wants the rest of the alien tech. And Geoff sold him a device that lets him try and try again until he gets whatever he wants.”

“You-“ Geoff cut himself off, and tried again. “Was this after Zancudo? You sold the device to him? After what it did?”

“Before my time.” Jeremy gave Alt-Geoff a concerned look. “I assume he had a good reason.”

“I still don’t get why Prince James is bombing the city.”

“King James. And I think he’s drawing the military away from Zancudo. They have a hell of a lot of alien tech down there.”

The front door creaked open.

“Hello?” Lindsay’s voice called out.

“Lindsay!” Ryan replied. “We’re down here. Shut the door behind you.”

Lindsay came down the stairs and stopped dead.

“Which one is the original?”

Everyone pointed at Alt-Geoff on the table.

“Shit. Where is everyone else?”

“I’m sorry.” Geoff said. “Jack and Michael are dead.”

“Fuck, fucking-“

Lindsay sunk to her knees.

Geoff wrapped his arms around her.

“Gavin should be here.” Lindsay whispered. “He left ages before me. If he isn’t here…”

“We’ll wait for him as long as we can.” Ryan promised. His hands were covered in blood.

“We can’t stay here?”

“Not for too much longer. This place is small and hidden, but not that well hidden. Nobody drove here, did you?”

Geoff and Lindsay confirmed they didn’t. Geoff decided it was too risky, with the helicopters flying around. He probably would have risked a motorbike if he knew Alt-Geoff was injured. As it was, they stayed away from open spaces, snuck through suburbia, and hiked up the side of the mountain to Gus’s.

“That should keep us safe a little while longer, but I’d bet the King knows about this place thanks to that helmet of his, if not the exact location. He’ll want the research and what’s stored here. We need to leave before he gets here.”

Lindsay stood up, shaking Geoff’s arms away.

“Then we need to destroy as much of it as we can before he does. The laser cannon will take care of most of it, and we can burn this place to the ground when we leave.”

“That will draw them right here.” Jeremy said.

“We can’t give him what he wants!” Lindsay argued. “He took Michael and Jack and Burnie from us. Gavin is probably dead. We can’t give him this place. We _can’t_.”

“Lindsay.” Jeremy placed his hands on her shoulders. “He’ll kill us. Do you understand that?”

A cold resolve overtook Lindsay. She squared her shoulders.

“You guys leave as soon as you can. I’ll give you a few hours to get away and then I’ll torch this place myself.”

“Lindsay-“ Jeremy started.

“Zip it. I can make my own choices. Now, where’s the rest of this alien tech. I want to make a pile.”

Lindsay climbed back up the stairs and busied herself searching the house.

“Jeremy,” Ryan said, “I need you here.”

“… Right, sorry. Where do I hold?”

Geoff made no move to get off the floor. Burnie was dead. Gavin was most likely dead. Lindsay would be dead soon. He knew better than to try and change her mind.

Los Santos was destroyed.

Prince James was coming for them.

“Ryan, he won’t stop bleeding.” Jeremy said after a little while.

“I know, I know, but if we hold on a little longer-“

-“I think the damage is internal. We need a hospital, or a nurse or something. I don’t think we’re actually helping him.”

“No-“

“-Ryan. He’s not breathing.”

“No!”

Ryan took a saturated shirt off the wound and pressed a fresh one in. Blood dripped off the table and onto the floor.

“If we just- we need more gauze. He needs-“ Ryan stopped talking.

Jeremy grabbed his arms and pulled him away. Ryan allowed Jeremy to lead him to Geoff and sit him down next to him.

Jeremy placed one of the clean shirts over Alt-Geoff’s upper half.

“Geoff.” Jeremy said.

Geoff looked up at him.

Jeremy wiped his bloodied hands on his pants. “What do we do?”

“I don’t-“

“Don’t you fucking dare say you don’t know.”

Geoff swallowed heavily. He looked at the hypercube on his arm but eventually he dragged his eyes away. “The choppers Prince James has are Annihilators. I know NOOSE headquarters have a few. If we steal one, we might be able to get to an airstrip without getting shot to pieces.”

“There’s a little private one at Grapeseed.” Jeremy said. “Just past the Alamo Sea. Do you think they’d have planes there?”

“Probably. Ryan and I know how to pilot larger aircraft. If there’s one there, we might be able to get to the mainland.”

“Okay. That sounds… good. We’re gonna be okay.”

“Yeah.”

 

* * *

 

Jeremy destroyed the pile of alien tech Lindsay found with the laser cannon. They gave her a short goodbye and left with whatever they could carry. They headed east. Geoff knew where NOOSE headquarters were in relation to Gus’s house.

They stopped when it got dark and began again in the morning. The time in between allowed them a private moment to grieve.

Ryan hadn’t said a word the entire time.

“How much further, do you reckon?” Jeremy asked. He scratched the side of his head with the laser cannon, which he hadn’t taken off.

“We’re about three miles out, if I recognise that road. Which, I think I do.”

“How do you know so much about the land around NOOSE headquarters?”

“You told me.”

“I did?”

“In my universe, you spent a lot of time trying to kill the Fakes for Prince James. After that, you spent a hell of a long time trying to save us from his ED-Garde. Quite a few of your attempts involved helicopters from there, and we’ve utilised your knowledge since then. Always nice to know where the helicopters are on this island.”

“Am I pretty similar to your Jeremy?”

Geoff managed to smile at him. “Almost indistinguishable. But you don’t have his world-weariness that comes from getting stuck in a time loop. How did you end up leaving Prince James and joining the Fakes in this universe?”

“A couple of months after Geoff sold James the device, he hired me to kill him. I wanted to move up in his ranks, so I agreed. But you convinced me not to. You told me to try being a Fake first and I loved it. I mean, not you, Geoff, I mean _my_ Geoff.”

“I call him Alt-Geoff in my head.”

“And then I slowly fell in love with Alt-Geoff and the others. Haven’t looked back. Even after yesterday, I don’t regret becoming a Fake. Anything was better than spending the rest of my life serving James, I came to realise.”

“Even getting stuck with the Fakes?”

Jeremy cracked a smile. “Are your Fakes… together, like mine were?”

Geoff nodded. “Ray included, until he left. You came later. I think it was just after Zancudo the second time that I figured out you were something special.”

“Zancudo the second time?”

Geoff started to explain, then backtracked and explained everything since he first met Jeremy at the docks. It was an interesting if not confusing story, and Geoff was happy to have someone he could tell the whole thing to. Someone who understood.

“So James has a working device, even if it’s in a terrible condition.”

“Yep.” Geoff confirmed.

“I wonder why he offered millions of dollars for the other one then? What can he do with two that he can’t with one?”

“I don’t think it’s about using them, Jeremy.” Geoff said.

“It’s about stopping everyone else from using it.” Ryan said. His voice was hoarse, and he cleared his throat before continuing. “The King James from your universe shows he doesn’t like using them himself. He just doesn’t want them to stop him.”

He looked at Geoff.

“Alt-Geoff sold King James the device because he claimed he could deactivate it without destroying it. Guess that turned out to be true. Geoff wanted the deactivated device back after a certain period of time to see if he could get visions like Ray did, but we know how that turned out.”

“Did Michael not destroy the device straight after Ray had those visions?”

“Not in our universe. King James, but he was still a Prince then I guess, got in contact with us the night before. We were more cautious with the device’s destruction after that.”

“Good to see you’re back with us, Ryan.” Jeremy said. “How are you holding up?”

“I’ll live. I know what we have to do next.”

“What?”

“Isn’t it obvious? King James isn’t using the devices. If we take out Zancudo before he gets to the heart of it, he’ll never get it back. Either of his two devices used after that can’t save Zancudo if it was destroyed beforehand.”

“Oh yeah?” Jeremy said. “How the hell are we gonna do that?”

“The same way Geoff did in his universe.” Ryan replied, pointing to the laser cannon.

 

* * *

 

The rest of the way to NOOSE headquarters was filled with quiet plans and all the details Geoff could provide about Zancudo. Once they came around the last mountain and the headquarters came into view, the talk stopped. There didn’t seem to be much activity going on- presumably most of their number had gone to fight King James.

Geoff knew of a back way in that didn’t trip any security alarms. There was a section of chain-link fence unattached to the security system, and it was easy to cut loose and peel back. Ryan frowned slightly when he saw the knife in Geoff’s hand but he didn’t say anything. Geoff made sure to carefully attach the fence back to its base.

It was still fairly early in the morning, so the shadows of vehicles and industry equipment helped them enter undetected. A lone guard wandered past but Ryan dealt with him before he could make a noise.

There was a dumpster up against a single storey building adjoining the main complex. Geoff and Ryan climbed up, and helped Jeremy join them. Together they gave him enough height to climb onto the roof and he hauled them up after him.

From there a decrepit looking ladder, or a fire escape of some sort, led to the roof. It had a cage around it with a pin pad lock but Geoff had used it three or four times before. An old code for an old, unused fire escape didn’t get changed very often, especially if the majority of the building’s occupants didn’t know it was there. The result of overworked and underpaid IT departments.

On the roof, an Annihilator sat waiting for them.

“It’s funny,” Jeremy said softly, “You’d think they would’ve fixed a security flaw like this after the first time you used it.”

“Only if they figure out how you did it.”

Plus a government agency that gets helicopters stolen from it once or twice a year tends to start to cover that up. Geoff is sure they have a set amount ready to write off each year thanks to the Fakes.

Geoff climbed into the pilot’s seat and prepped the Annihilator for take-off. Once everyone was ready, he took off as quickly as he dared and headed north east, towards Zancudo.

Zancudo rested at the base of Mount Josiah, a mountain with many craggy peaks and hidden valleys. Geoff followed the river down towards Zancudo, sticking close to the water. The ocean winds tossed the chopper around enough for Geoff to have to fight with the controls, but he managed.

As soon as Zancudo came into sight Geoff pulled up out of the valley and behind the protection of Mount Josiah. The airspace above Zancudo was crawling with helicopters and the ground scattered with evidence of a fight. Very low to the ground, Geoff hovered just to the side of a peak and turned to let Jeremy see Zancudo out the side.

“Are we close enough?” Ryan shouted to be heard over the wind. He sat in the gunner position, controlling two of the miniguns.

“We’re about half a mile away- that should be enough to reach most of the facility.” Geoff replied. “Ready when you are. You remember where to aim?” He directed at Jeremy.

“I do.”

Jeremy aimed the laser cannon and fired.

A cyan beam hurtled through the sky and disappeared into one of Zancudo’s runways. The beam snapped to the right and bisected a watchtower and two hangars. The light from the beam was obstructed by various aircraft exploding, a harsh red and yellow light engulfing it. Jeremy aimed the beam lower, cutting deep into the ground, until it finally petered out.

Jeremy let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding.

“Alright,” Jeremy said, “duck around this peak and we’ll do it again at the next-“

“Incoming!” Ryan shouted.

Geoff peeled away from the mountaintop just as two helicopters approached and returned fire. Ryan managed to take down one with a minigun while Jeremy took care of the other. Geoff banked hard from the slope and flew towards a new peak.

As soon as Jeremy could see over the top of the peak, he let loose with the laser cannon. The beam tore into the bulk of the remaining buildings and a section below caved in, swallowing a building whole.

Six helicopters turned to face them and Geoff baulked at the sight.

“Right, I think that’s as much as we can do. Take out as many as you can and we’ll lose the rest up the coast.”

Jeremy’s laser cannon ripped one in half and sent the cockpit falling into another, causing them both to spiral down together. Another got close enough to return fire and Ryan gunned it down.

An errant air current swung the tail around, and Geoff gained altitude to regain control. One of the choppers suddenly shot forwards and fired its miniguns into the tail rotor system.

Ryan managed to get some bullets in the pilot before Geoff’s Annihilator hit the side of the mountain and tumbled down it.

Geoff tried to keep his limbs tucked in close, as much as he could for the duration of the crash. He knew he and Ryan were strapped in- Jeremy was not.

They didn’t fall far. Geoff was flying close to the ground and the chopper caught on a rock on the way down to the valley. The abrupt stop made Geoff bang his head against the headrest. He groaned, unclipped his harness and slid out of his seat onto the grass.

“Geoff?” Jeremy called out.

Geoff made his eyes focus on the voice a little way above him up the mountain. Jeremy was about twenty feet away, one of his legs twisted at an odd angle. He’d fallen out of the helicopter during the crash.

Jeremy pointed back towards the wrecked chopper.

“Ryan’s stuck, I can see him, please, can you-“

The three remaining helicopters approached.

Geoff looked where Jeremy pointed and saw Ryan tangled up in the metal of the gunner’s seat. He looked at Geoff with pleading eyes.

Geoff looked back at the helicopters.

Their miniguns would be in range soon. Seconds.

Geoff held his left arm up in front of him.

“Geoff?”

Refusing to look at either of them, Geoff spun the hypercube.

The world dissolved into billions of tiny strings and then nothing.

 

* * *

 

Geoff opened his eyes to Alt-Geoff’s shocked expression.

“What the _fuck?!”_ Alt-Geoff exclaimed.

“I left them.” Geoff said. “I just- I left them there- what kind of-“

He threw up.


	3. Type 2A - Chirality 1

“Are you alright?” Ryan asked.

Geoff wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His left hand, and he took a moment to stare at it.

“Hypercube fragment fell off again. I don’t- I lost the tape. It’s gone.”

“Are you real?” Michael said.

Geoff stopped dead and looked at him. “Are you?”

“I-“

-“Because I watched an Annihilator tear you apart with a minigun. You were alive one second and the next you were a pile of guts and bones. And I stole a weapon from your corpse.”

“I didn’t-“

-“Don’t fucking lie to me!”

Strong hands gripped his shoulders and manhandled him into a sitting position on a couch. The same hands cupped his jaw and lifted his chin and Geoff was forced to stare into Ryan’s eyes.

“You need to calm down.”

Geoff took a deep, shuddering breath.

“Careful,” Jack said from somewhere in the background, “he’s armed.”

“Where?” Ryan said.

“Gun. Waistband.”

Ryan carefully removed the Glock from his possession.

“Knife.” Geoff said.

“What?”

“I have a knife. Inner jacket pocket.”

Ryan took it too and it was only then Geoff let himself slide loose and boneless into his seat.

“I- sorry. Sorry. You don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“No, we don’t.” Alt-Geoff replied. “So you better start explaining. Why do you look like me? How did you get here?”

“Well hang on,” Ryan said, “can we give him a minute? Look at him. He looks like he’s come from a war zone.”

“A guy suddenly appears in our living room and you don’t want to know how he did it?”

“He’s obviously you, Geoff, so I don’t see why we need to instantly go into interrogation mode.”

Geoff winced a little.

Jack looked him up and down. “I think he’s going into shock. Are you okay? Are you bleeding?”

Geoff looked down at himself. His right side was covered in blood. Not his- Ryan’s, he guessed. His suit was still carrying a fair amount of dust and ashes, and small tears in the jacket revealed his blood and dirt-stained shirt. A final reminder of Alt-Geoff’s demise. He could feel the grit grind into the skin of his eyelids when he blinked. The movement of looking down on himself sent tiny streams of ashes falling from his hair onto his pants.

The back of his head throbbed.

“Most of it’s not mine.” Geoff said. “I- water. Can I-?”

Jack looked towards Alt-Geoff, who nodded in approval. Jack left for the kitchen and Geoff dropped his head into his hands, taking steady breaths. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted the broken piece of the device, sitting innocently on the ground next to the coffee table.

“That thing on his arm,” Michael muttered, “Look how it’s moving. How is it doing that?”

“I don’t know,” Ryan replied. “I want to say magic, but…” he shrugged, “I can’t think of anything better.”

They didn’t know about the alien tech. They didn’t know about aliens, or other universes, or anything. Geoff knew he’d have to explain it all to them, but right now he couldn’t bear to think back over it all, especially the last few days. There was too much- it was too much right now. He couldn’t do all this right now.

Jack returned with a glass of water and handed it over. Geoff took it with a nod of thanks and took a small sip, focusing more on holding his hand steady than the cool feel of it down his throat.

He almost pulled a Jeremy- dumped the water over Jack, dashed out of the apartment- it would have been easy. Geoff was sure he could outrun everyone except maybe Michael, so he’d chuck the glass at him first. Duck out of Alt-Geoff’s way and lose them on the fire stairs. Wait a while and then make his way to a safehouse on the other side of the city somewhere. Hell, maybe even the same safehouse Jeremy ran to when they’d had that big fight a few years ago. It took a couple of days for the rest of the crew to track him down.

And then what? His possessions, including the broken piece of the device, were here. There was nothing to gain from running away. But that didn’t stop him wanting to; so much so that he gently placed the glass of water on the coffee table just in case he was tempted to throw it.

He couldn’t run. He shouldn’t, and while he thought he was doing a great job tamping down his panic his eyes slipped over Jack’s and his brow creased like he was in pain.

“Just… how about you go clean yourself up, Geoff.” Jack said. “You are Geoff, right?”

Geoff nodded.

Jack tilted his head at the rooms behind him. “Come back when you’re ready.”

Alt-Geoff and Michael began to protest but Jack smiled at him and gestured.

Jack, always understanding, always accommodating, always putting others before himself. Jack. He had the same kind eyes, the same smile, the same white hairs in his beard as the Jack he knew. The only difference was his Jack was missing a chunk of his ear from the fight with Prince James.

This Jack, he knew from one look, loved him. Or at least, loved a man who looked a lot like him.

As Geoff slipped away he almost reached out to touch his shoulder, or kiss him, but Jack moved out of the way and Geoff remembered he was a stranger. He grabbed that warm feeling, that fire that spread through his chest and curled around his ribs and stomach, heated his palms, flushed his cheeks, and he crushed it.

 

* * *

 

“So why just Alt-Geoff?” Michael asked, hours later when Geoff felt human again, “why don’t we get an Alt in front of our names?”

Geoff shrugged, his mouth full of Ryan’s incredible cooking. Evening had fallen and cast the lounge room in a warm orange haze. A shadow from a neighbouring skyscraper slowly but surely forced its way through the floor to ceiling windows and now a good third of the room was in shadow. The other six people in the room didn’t seem to notice or feel an urge to turn a light on- they were too engrossed in Geoff’s story.

The two extra people were Gavin and Jeremy, who let themselves in about an hour ago and Geoff had to start his whole spiel again.

But as soon as they stepped into the living room, it seemed to come alive. The other four Fakes from this universe lit up like bonfires, and a fog Geoff hadn’t been aware of cleared from his mind. To watch his own face shine with such warmth was surreal. He didn’t know he could look so happy, couldn’t believe how open he was to showing it. Happiness fit on his face like the last puzzle piece in the right place, or a book on a bookshelf, or the sun in the sky. The other five people he lived with brought something shining out of his soul and he looked a little less tired, a little younger, a little more vibrant. The same could be said for the other Fakes.

This was the first time Geoff saw all six of them, together, clearly, and it felt like he was watching his own life on video. The people he knew and adored swanning around like they owned the place, which they did, laughing and joking and fixing dinner, swatting wandering hands away from toppings and vegetables, sharing inside jokes that Geoff understood, that Geoff was sick of, that Geoff invented.

This must be how everyone else saw them.

It was all he could do to sit on that couch and keep talking. The wave of loneliness that hit him, sharp and hard like a bullet but without the wet warmth, almost floored him. To carry on, without his own Fakes, was suddenly a punch in the gut that ripped right through him. He wanted them the same way he wanted to leave Zancudo: it was the driving force of his existence. There was this or there was nothing.

Jack was probably right- he was in shock. Emotions all over the place.

So he watched them talk, and touch, and wrap around each other, and he talked at them like there wasn’t an insurmountable gulf between them, a disconnect so large it spanned universes, and answered Michael’s question:

“I dunno, I guess you just remind me too much of the Fakes in my universe? I mean, you look pretty similar, heh heh.”

 

* * *

 

This was, Geoff realised, what his universe would’ve looked like without alien tech making a mess of it.

The Roosevelt was cramped with seven people sitting in it, and Geoff was uncomfortably squished between Ryan and Jeremy. Jeremy, who joined the crew to help them deal with Colmillo Blanco and never left. There was no Prince James, no evil Corpirate, at least none that Gavin could prove, no downed UFOs. Zancudo still existed, as did Arcadius and the Mile High Tower, which was torn down in Geoff's universe due to structural concerns.

Alt-Geoff and Jack were on their way to meet with Funhaus, and the others were accompanying Geoff to grab some supplies he said he needed.

“I need a bug-out bag,” Geoff explained, after they'd dropped the other two off and parked in the shopping complex. “I'm getting pretty sick of explaining everything every three hours or so, so I want a camera and some USBs or something. And the strongest superglue we can find. You know what else? I wanna put a tracker in all my shit. Can’t afford to keep leaving stuff behind.”

“Have you also considered, like, food and water?” Michael asked. “in case you get stuck in another hellhole.”

“That’s a good idea. Some medical supplies too. Maybe another gun.”

“You should get a satellite phone,” Ryan said. “at least, a phone that works everywhere. Just in case. And a more casual jacket. Sunglasses.”

“Fake IDs!” Gavin cut in. “I can make them up in a couple of hours. Just tell me what you want them to say.”

“I wouldn’t want to put Gus out of a job,” Geoff retorted.

“Gus makes fake Ids?”

“I don’t know if he makes them, but he certainly has them. A couple for the Corpirate’s employees, at least, and a few others.”

They didn’t end up finding something to help Geoff track all his belongings. But they got most of his other requirements and a sturdy backpack, which didn’t look nice at all next to Geoff’s suit, but he refused to change. It was his style, dammit.

Once they’d fucked around there for a few hours, and picked up Geoff and Jack, they had lunch at a burger place Jeremy recommended. It was nice, as quiet as the middle of the city could get during the day, and they were close enough to the water to get that sea breeze and the faint waft of the ocean. Geoff took a bite out of his burger and heard a noise in the sky and his head spun in that direction so fast he was sure, afterwards, that he pulled a muscle.

“What?” Jack said. “What is it?”

“Nothing. Helicopter. Surprised me.” Geoff muttered, and put his burger down, appetite gone.

The helicopter passed by harmlessly overhead, its underbelly partly obscured by the skyscrapers below it. Only once the sound if the motors faded away did Geoff’s shoulders relax and he sagged low in his seat.

Odd reaction. Clearly there must be some lingering stress over yesterday’s events, but Geoff frowned to himself. He hadn’t had a reaction like that to the helicopters after Zancudo. Why was he having one now?

Was this going to be a thing? Geoff didn’t have time for a thing. Could he have one day, God, one day where there wasn’t a thing?

Yesterday was hard enough. One day, he wanted, where he didn’t have to think about some bullshit. One day of pseudo-normality. With the Fakes. Not his Fakes, of course. The fake Fakes.

It was probably a metaphor or something. For, something. Geoff didn’t know.

“What’s wrong with the helicopter?” Michael asked.

“Nothing! The helicopter’s fine! The helicopter’s fine, and we’re fine, and it’s all fine.” Geoff said, too much fire in his words.

The rest of the group took a long pause. If they made any secret signals at each other, Geoff missed them because he was too busy trying to pick all the sesame seeds off the burger bun.

“Geoff,” Ryan said in a low voice, “If you need to talk about something-“

“-I don’t have anything to say to _you_.” Geoff cut him off, still with too much venom.

“Hey, take it easy. I’m just trying to help.”

“I know, I know.” Geoff finally pushed the burger away from him. “I have learned the importance of communication again and again and again. I have a great network of people I can talk to about anything, with no judgement. But they’re not here. And you are not a replacement.”

“But you should-“

“-And you know what else? They also understood that not everything under the fucking sun had to be discussed and they were happy to give each other a sense of privacy. It’s called boundaries. Maybe you should try them sometimes.”

“Geoff.” Ryan said, pulling a face.

Geoff sighed.

“You’ll have to excuse me if, after spending several days in fear of a helicopter passing overhead and shooting the shit out of me or one of you, they put me on edge a little bit.”

Ryan and Jack exchanged a look, but something in Jack’s expression must’ve calmed Ryan, because he didn’t press any more, and none of the others did either.

Geoff ate his burger in peace.

 

* * *

 

After lunch they stopped by an Ammunation. Geoff picked up some more ammunition for his Glock, as well as a set of light armour. He’d decided to forgo the second gun, as his bag was heavy enough already.

On a whim, he gave his credit card to the cashier and was mildly surprised to see it was accepted.

“Well, well, well,” Geoff said, laughing to himself. “Would you look at that. My credit card still works.”

“But,” Ryan said, “who’s account is it connected to? Our Geoff’s?”

“Sweet!” Michael called out, and picked up a knife that looked like an antique. “Universe jumping Geoff can cover the rest of the shopping.”

“Oh no,” Alt-Geoff said, “nuh uh. Hey, can I have a look at that card for a sec?”

Gavin dropped a stack of body armour on the counter and snatched the card from Geoff’s fingers. He passed it to the cashier, who accepted it with a politely confused expression at the proceedings. Alt-Geoff tried to reach for it but Gavin planted himself firmly between Alt-Geoff and the cashier.

“Quickly, please!” Gavin said with a raised voice as he struggled to keep Alt-Geoff away.

 

* * *

 

Back at the penthouse, Jack handed Geoff one of his personalised, tried and true med kits filled with the odds and ends Jack had found particularly useful in their line of work.

“Way better than what you’d get at a shop,” Jack explained, and Geoff didn’t find the need to tell him he’d helped his Jack build a similar kit back in his own universe, “and all the good painkillers. But if your universe is anything like this one, you’d be able to get this stuff from Dr Shawcross as well. If you ask nicely.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

 

* * *

 

“Ready?” Jeremy asked.

“And… go!” Ryan said.

Geoff slid the broken piece of the device into place and held it there while the glue took hold. Jeremy started the timer on his phone and slid it over next to Geoff.

“So how long does this usually take?”

“A few hours. A little under three, I think. I’ll know when it’s ready to go. I’m gonna do this for the next few universes after this one and see if the timing’s consistent.”

Ryan’s phone buzzed.

“We’ve got a problem.” Ryan said, eyes scanning the text. “Fight’s breaking out in the northern suburbs. Lindsay thinks it’s some remnant of Colmillo Blanco. We should help deal with this.”

Jeremy nodded, then looked at Geoff.

“You want in?”

“Eh, better not.” Geoff shrugged and raised the hypercube at him. “Best if I just sit here for now.”

“It would probably psych them out if they saw two Geoffs coming at them.”

“Or Lindsay would shoot me, thinking I was an evil twin. I wouldn’t want to screw up your dynamic.”

“Is she wrong?” Ryan called out, halfway out the door.

“If I’m evil, I’m the lesser of the two of us!” Geoff shouted back.

“Fair, fair.” Jeremy said. “We’ll see you in a few hours then.”

“I’ll have take-out here ready and waiting for you.”

 

* * *

 

“Of course you’d know our favourite dishes.” Jack said.

“I’ve only ordered them for you, like, a hundred times.” Geoff replied.

“So how long’d it take?” Jeremy asked, resting his feet on the coffee table. The living room was quiet while Ryan fast-forwarded through the ads on the TV. The only sounds were the quiet scrape of cutlery and glassware as the crew ate dinner.

“Two hours and a little under forty five minutes.” Geoff answered. “We’ll see if that holds steady.”

“No we won’t,” Gavin said quietly from the couch.

“No,” Geoff agreed, “I guess you won’t.”

 

* * *

 

It was evening again, all of a sudden it felt like, and Geoff was left alone in the living room with Alt-Geoff.

“Quiet out, tonight.” Alt-Geoff asked.

Geoff nodded his head in acknowledgement. There was a glass of diet coke in his hand, rapidly collecting condensation. In Alt-Geoff’s, a glass of whiskey. He swirled it, glass clinking, for a few moments before continuing.

“You uh, doing alright? After everything that happened earlier?”

“What the hell do you think?” Geoff replied. He wasn’t sure if Alt-Geoff meant earlier today or in the other universe, and he decided it didn’t matter.

“I think you’re handling things just about as well as I would, which is saying something.”

Alt-Geoff didn’t offer him whiskey, which Geoff was grateful for. Geoff swirled his diet coke in exactly the same manner as Alt-Geoff did. Geoff flicked his eyes up to Alt-Geoff’s and waited for him to continue.

“Do you want to talk to a, uh, a-“

“Nope.” Geoff said, and downed his drink.

“Nope?”

“Nope.”

The sky behind them darkened. No clouds flew by over it, to cover the view. The whole city lit up in the colours of sunset, reflected off the glass. The occasional honk of a car horn far below filtered up but not loud enough to disturb the quiet.

“Is there anyone-“

“Nope.”

“Geoff.” Alt-Geoff said gently. “The others all talked to me, after lunch today.”

“Great. I don’t care.”

“We’re not… we’re not the Fakes you knew-“

“-You’re goddamn right you’re not.” Geoff cut him off. “You’re not like them at all,” he lied.

“Why not?” Alt-Geoff said. “How exactly are we different?”

“You don’t-“ Geoff broke off suddenly. “You’re not cautious like you should be.”

“You mean, like we should be if we’d gone through the same shit as you did.”

“Yeah.”

“Newsflash, asshole, we didn’t. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t go through shit. It wasn’t a walk in the park, getting to this position in the city.”

“I know, dickbait.”

Geoff could see a long scar, almost running the length of Alt-Geoff’s hand, raised and gnarled in the way old scars were. Alt-Geoff’d re-inked the tattoo over the top but it wasn’t a perfect colour match. Looking closer now, Alt-Geoff’s grip wasn’t exactly steady and even around the glass.

Alt-Geoff took a long drink and leaned back against the couch. Geoff tipped an ice cube into his mouth and chewed on it.

“Why the hell do you care, anyway?” Geoff asked Alt-Geoff.

“I don’t. I think you’re too fucking disconcerting and the sooner you’re out of my universe, the better.”

Geoff inclined his head. Fair enough.

“But my crew cares. Each of them, individually, came to me and asked me to talk to you. They hate to see you hurting.”

“Why the hell-“

-“Because you look like me, dipshit.” Alt-Geoff cut in. “You look like me, you talk like me, you hurt like me. And they’re sick of seeing me in pain without addressing it.”

“I’m not you-“

“-They know that, and I know that, and you know that. But that doesn’t stop it hurting them all the same.”

Geoff worried his lip a little.

“Well, I’m sorry. For causing you and your crew unnecessary pain.”

There was another tense silence.

“Can you just-“

“-No.” Geoff said.

“Please? Just… talk to me, okay? Not for me. For my crew.”

“No.”

Alt-Geoff sighed and ran a hand down his face.

“The negotiations with Funhaus aren’t going too well.” Alt-Geoff said. “They want too much control over the western suburbs, the west coast. It won’t look good for us to give ‘em exactly what they want, but we don’t have the manpower to hold the whole west coast by ourselves. If Jack and I don’t solve this properly, we’d be putting everyone we love at risk. It’s stressing me out a little.”

Alt-Geoff leaned forward in his seat.

“So when I go to bed tonight, I’m gonna talk to Jack about it. Maybe before then, I’ll toss Michael a beer and him and Ryan and I will go up on the roof. Or Gavin and Jeremy will bother me until I can take my mind off it for a while. Or I might pour myself another few fingers of this and actually get around to answering all the emails Lindsay sends me.”

Alt-Geoff raised his glass a little, angling it at Geoff. “You can’t do any of these things. And I’d know how I’d feel if I couldn’t. So come on. One no strings attached conversation with someone who knows you best that you also won’t ever have to see again, soon enough.”

Geoff smiled and shook his head, staring into his glass. A thought occurred to him.

“Why’d your crew ask _you_ to talk to me, instead of, say, Jack?”

“Oh no, trust me, they all went to him first. I did too. But Jack thought it might be easier for you to talk to someone who didn’t look like anyone else you knew.”

“I don’t-“ Geoff clicked his tongue- “I can’t substitute them, you know? I can’t do that.”

“So what, you’re just not gonna talk to anyone until this is all over?”

“Who’s going to understand?”

Alt-Geoff gestured at the room with his drink. “What am I trying to do right now?”

Geoff shook his head again, this time with more conviction. “I just have to find the right universe, do what I’m told, and then I can head home. That’s the only important thing. I’ve probably spent too long in this universe as it is. I have to keep moving.”

“How long do you think it’s gonna take to find the right universe? What if it’s months, years-“

“-It’s not gonna take that long.” Geoff cut him off with a bit more force than was necessary.

Alt-Geoff looked at him with an expression Geoff couldn’t quite read. Pinched brows, downturned mouth, sad eyes. It made Geoff want to look away.

“It’s a lonely road, you have planned.”

“Of course it is. I don’t have my crew with me.”

Alt-Geoff put his glass down, a bit of whiskey slopping over the sides. “I’m trying to say, Geoff, that there’s more than one crew in the whole multiverse who’ll look out for you.”

“I don’t want them too! I want _my_ crew!”

Geoff stood up, breathing hard. He looped a backpack strap over his shoulder. Suddenly he couldn’t bear spending another second in this apartment, filled with memories and smells and things and people and it was all just a bit overwhelming. Any other universe right now seemed more bearable.

“I’ve spent long enough in this universe. I have to get back to them.”

“No, wait-“

Geoff spun one of the hypercube’s edges and the universe split into a trillion tiny strings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aiight, so I don't have the energy to make 10k chapters anymore. So I'm splitting them up into 3 parts each around 3 or 4k and like with Smile and Wave I'll combine them back into the right number of chapters at the end. It means the chapter names might be a bit confusing and I'll lose the comments from the chapters I end up deleting, but it's better than no chapters hah?


	4. Type 2A - Chirality 2

This universe looked remarkably like the previous one.

“Excuse me, uh,” Alt-Geoff said, “what the fuck?”

“Shit,” Geoff said, mostly to himself, “I didn’t record anything for you. Hey, does Gavin have a camera laying around somewhere? A good one?”

“Are you all seeing this?” Jack asked.

Geoff glanced at his left arm. The superglue had lasted the journey, and the hypercube held together. It had still lost its glow, so Geoff suspected it still needed time to charge. He pulled his phone out of his pocket to-

-“Whoa whoa whoa,” Ryan said, pulling a gun, “slow down there, pal.”

Geoff raised his hands in a placating manner and lowered himself to the floor, crossing his legs.

“Jesus Christ I’m really not in the mood for another long-winded explanation.” Geoff said.

“Well that’s too fucking bad,” Alt-Geoff snapped, also pulling out a gun. The same Glock Geoff had in his waistband. “because I’m gonna need one.”

Geoff rolled his eyes.

 

* * *

 

Geoff sat down at the dining room table and adjusted the little tripod the camera was sitting on.

“That’s probably not straight enough,” Geoff muttered, “Heh. Last time I ever say that.” He cleared his throat. “Alright, me from another universe. I’m Geoff Ramsey, but I’m hoping you already figured that out and you’re not as dumb as you look.”

Geoff paused, thinking.

“I legitimately have no idea what the fuck to say.”

Geoff aimed his chin in the direction towards the kitchen.

“Hey Alt- uh, hey Geoff? Can you come ‘ere a sec?”

“Yeah, what?” Alt-Geoff’s head appeared beside Geoff’s.

“Say something that’d convince you that I wasn’t a crazy person. Or an evil clone.”

Alt-Geoff pulled a face. “I legitimately have no idea what the fuck to say. I mean, he _is_ crazy though. Universe jumping? Alien technology? I wouldn’t have believed it without the doohickie on his arm. But if you can come up with a better explanation for it than what he says, then by all means.”

Geoff turned back towards the camera. “That’s a good start.”

 

* * *

 

This universe looked remarkably like the previous one.

“What the fuck?” Alt-Geoff said, predictably. Geoff was getting a little sick of hearing that.

“Very original.” Geoff said. “Let me guess, no alien technology in this universe either?”

“Excuse me?”

Not that he should complain that not much was changing between the last few universes. Predictability meant safety. Knowledge was power.

But these universes didn’t have any alien technology. At least, not readily available in the way he wanted. Spending time here didn’t bring him any closer to home.

And if he was honest, it was grating on him a bit to see his crew’s doppelgangers enjoying each other’s company. The similarities were… jarring, and it made his heart ache. Made him think too much of the five people he cared most about, who had no idea what happened to him. He wondered, for a brief, moment, how much time had passed since he’d last seen them. Maybe they’d had a funeral for him.

“Okay, time to get the ball rolling. I’m you from a different universe.” Geoff said quickly. “Any questions?”

 

* * *

 

This universe looked remarkably like the previous one.

 

 

* * *

 

This universe looked remarkably like the previous one.

 

* * *

 

This universe looked remarkably like the previous one.

A low bit of dread settled deep in Geoff’s stomach. Why were all these universes the same? They _were_ different universes, weren’t they? It wasn’t a- he wasn’t stuck in another-

No. His watch dutifully recorded the passing of time and didn’t jump or skip even when moving between universes. He felt hungry, and could feel short, coarse beard hairs on his jaw. He was still ageing and changing.

There was also no flash of red light.

 

* * *

 

This universe looked remarkably like the previous one.

"It may come as a surprise, but if I'm being honest, there are days where I'm simply not in the mood to be held at gunpoint by one of my alternate reality selves."

Geoff felt cool metal press against the back of his skull.

"How about me?" Ryan growled. "Can I hold you at gunpoint?"

"Drama queen, you're not gonna shoot me. And yeah, I know that makes you kind of want to shoot me more, but you still won't."

"And why shouldn't I?"

"Because you've never seen Geoff's blood and brains blown out across the floor before, and you don't think you can handle being the cause of that." Geoff said, calmly certain.

The gun against his skull moved away.

"How could you possibly know that?"

"Because this isn’t my first rodeo, bucko. You’re not the first Ryan to pull a gun on me today and I’ll bet what’s left of my eyebrows you won’t be the last.”

"Wait, sorry," Jack said, "I'm not following."

"That's fine." A USB appeared in Geoff's hand, and he tossed it to Jack, who caught it instinctively. "Open up the video file labelled "Quick Explanation", then feel free to go through the rest."

Geoff shed his bag and disarmed, leaving his weapons in a tidy pile on top of the bag. Next went his shoes, his jacket, and the light body armour. The four other people in the living room watched, but made no move against him, although Ryan didn't let his gun slip all the way towards the floor.

"Now if you don't mind," Geoff said, "I'm going to take a nap in the spare bedroom. Feel free to lock the door if you're that skittish. I don't give a fuck. I haven't slept in two days."

They let him blearily wander down the hallway without stopping him.

 

* * *

 

Geoff tapped two fingers against the side of a whiteboard marker. He stared up at a whiteboard covered with his own handwriting and little pictures. It showed an accurate a timeline as he could remember, with details about the different universes.

“I don’t know why the pattern’s changed,” Geoff muttered. “Was it something I did? Or the hypercube’s breaking even more?”

Jack took the marker from him and laid it flat on the table top. “If you can’t think of anything you did differently, I doubt it was you.”

“Hey Geoff. Not you,” Gavin waved away Alt-Geoff’s attention, “the other Geoff. You come across a version of us that owned a super yacht?”

“Gavin, I also own a super yacht.” Geoff paused. “Two, actually, if you don’t count the first one that exploded. You don’t… have one?”

Alt-Geoff picked up the marker and approached the whiteboard. “We don’t have enough downtime to waste it relaxing on a yacht. It’s a struggle holding our position in the city as it is, and we really don’t have time to deal with that as well as the nonsense you’ve brought in.”

“Well excuse me,” Geoff said, “I didn’t ask to travel to your universe, and as soon as I can I’ll fuck off, which’ll be in about half an hour. I doubt your little criminal empire can fall apart that quickly.”

Alt-Geoff flipped him off and turned his attention back to the whiteboard. His fingers tapped on the side of the white board marker as he did. “The other universes just like this one,” Alt-Geoff started, “did those Geoffs have yachts?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

“And no alien technology.”

Geoff inclined his head in agreement.

Alt-Geoff drew a circle around the collection of similar universes. Inside the bubble, he wrote “Normal Universes” and outside, “Weird Fucking Universes”.

“The most I can gather is that you came from a weird fucking corner of the multiverse, didn’t you.”

“Eat a dick.”

“Fuck yeah I will.” Alt-Geoff replied, smirking.

 

* * *

 

“I think the douchebag Geoff from your last universe was right.” Ryan said.

“You’re not just saying that because you’re mad I predicted you wouldn’t shoot me?”

“Only partly. I really think there’s a lot more universes out there that are like mine than there are like yours. You did, as you would say, “come from a weird fucking corner of the universe”.”

Geoff leaned back in his chair. “What makes you say that? I thought there were an infinite number of other universes. Wouldn’t that mean there’s an infinite amount of both?”

Michael sat down near them with a couple of bags of take out. “But it’s gotta be more likely that an alien spaceship, or _two_ alien spaceships, _don’t_ crash into Mt Gordo. So, more universes where that doesn’t happen.”

“That’s not how it works.” Geoff worried his lip. “It’s not chance, is it? I land in a universe like yours because there’s more of them?” Geoff turned to Ryan, who shrugged and pulled a face.

“I dunno. You know more about this stuff than me.”

“And that’s a terrible thought.”

Ryan nodded in agreement. "It’s true. Out of everyone in the crew, you're the last one I'd suspect to think about a hypothetical this much.”

Geoff shrugged. "Not in the crew, remember. I'd think so too, but this isn’t a hypothetical for me. While waiting for this to recharge," Geoff held his arm up, the hypercube glowing steadily, "I've had time to think about it a lot."

Michael handed a burger to Gavin, who immediately took a bite and also chose that moment to share his opinion.

“You control,” Gavin took a moment to cough and swallow, and Geoff fought to keep an innocent expression on his face with that thought, “the time part of it, don’t you?”

Geoff frowned. “Excuse me?”

“You control when you change universes, by spinning the thingy. Hypercube. So it’s not entirely up to chance, right?”

“Well it can’t be completely up to chance,” Geoff said. “I’m here, in this universe for a reason. Jeremy's device right at the start showed me a universe where I do something, something important. I just have to get there.”

Michael chewed his lip. “But…?”

Geoff crossed his arms and leaned against the table.

“But it doesn’t feel right. Every time I travel to a new universe, it just feels wrong. I didn’t get that feeling when jumping universes in Zancudo. Something’s gone awry. I’m not where I’m supposed to be, at least, not yet. Either I’ll eventually end up where I need to be or I’ll find a way to make that so.”

“If the hypercube isn’t sending you where you need to be,” Gavin mused, “and it isn’t chance, then what’s controlling where you’re going?”

Geoff shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s most likely the aliens, or some faulty line of code in the hypercube. Or it’s chance, I guess. I’m hoping to come across a universe where there’s more alien technology available, because there’s an alien helmet that could help me. It can control pretty much anything that runs on electricity.”

Michael snorted. “Maybe that’s why you’re here.”

“What?”

“That’s why you’re in all these universes without that technology.”

“Ah,” Ryan said, following Michael’s line of thought, “Geoff, maybe you’re being led on a very deliberate path, here.”

“That’s not likely.” Geoff argued. “Why would the aliens lead me away from all their technology and the events of my universe? They need me to use their technology to shoot down their spaceships over Mt Gordo. Why would they take me away from that?”

“Then it’s not them.” Gavin said simply.

Geoff didn’t like that answer.

“No, there must be some other reason why I’m here.” Geoff said hotly. “This just must be on the way to Mt Gordo.”

“Geoff,” Ryan said gently, “if you believed that, you wouldn’t be trying so hard to figure out what’s going on. Because you’d know.”

“You said it feels wrong, Geoff.” Michael added. “There’s probably a reason for that. Trust your gut.”

Geoff shook his head. “No, I’m probably just… It’s probably just taking a longer time than suggested in what Jeremy's device showed me. I have to have more fucking patience.”

“Geoff,” Gavin said, “how many universes like mine have you visited?”

Dozens. Not, like, a hundred or anything ridiculous like that. But Geoff’s felt the need to sleep about five times. Assuming he does that once a day for seven hours, and spends three hours in a universe otherwise…

“Not enough to, you know, worry about it.” Geoff lied.

Ryan rolled his eyes. Michael and Gavin exchanged a look.

 

* * *

 

This universe looked remarkably like the previous one.

 

* * *

 

This universe looked remarkably like the previous one.

 

* * *

 

"I would kill to meet myself from another world." Gavin said, almost overbalancing on his chair. "Halve my workload."

"You'd annoy yourself to death," Ryan chided.

"No I wouldn't. It'd be great because then there'd be at least one other person who knew what I was on about."

"I take it back. You wouldn't annoy yourself, you'd confuse yourself to death."

Geoff hid his grin behind a hand.

"What about you, Ryan? Fancy meeting yourself?"

Ryan grimaced. "Not even a little."

Gavin laughed. "The collective angst would probably kill us all."

"Oi, Ryan," Geoff said, "Think less about meeting your other self, and more about how useful it’d be to have another of you around.”

Geoff’s Ryan still occasionally paced around the apartment in the middle of the night, checking the locks and that all the weaponry was put away safely. There was a good chance this Ryan probably did the same thing. All the Ryan’s he’d met in this string of universes didn’t seem all that different, Geoff was game enough to admit now.

Ryan took that into consideration. "Why stop at one? Think about what I could do with a verifiable army of Ryans. Now that I’d like to see.”

“I take it all back. One Ryan is definitely enough.”

Alt-Geoff and Jack chose that moment to stumble into the room, a little out of breath and a lot bleeding.

“It’s not going so great with Funhaus,” Jack grunted out while he helped Alt-Geoff into a chair.

“Are you both okay?” Ryan asked.

“He’ll live,” Jack inclined his head at Alt-Geoff. “knife wound, left calf. He’s lost a fair bit of blood.”

“Gavin, get Jack’s med kit. And you?”

“Nothing a couple of band aids won’t solve. I can sew up Geoff’s leg, don’t think there’s a need to see Kerry.”

“Your shoulder’s bleeding,” Ryan countered, and _tisked_ at the injury. Jack swatted him away.

“What the hell happened?” Geoff said, standing up and moving away to clear some space.

“Funhaus wasn’t in the negotiating mood, is what happened.” Alt-Geoff grumbled. He hissed in pain when Ryan stretched his injured leg out onto the chair next to him. “And we went there with a show of faith by only taking the two of us. Assholes. And here I was, ready to negotiate away the west coast for them.”

There was a liquor cabinet in the next room, and Geoff darted away to grab a bottle of something strong to pour a glass. He passed it to Alt-Geoff, who took three large gulps and coughed a couple of times. Geoff finally noticed it was his favourite brand of expensive whiskey, and his old preferred way of managing pain when there was nothing else available. The smell of it lingered in the air, the sharp alcoholic scent mixed with cinnamon and a hint of something floral. Geoff hadn’t smelled it in years.

But he didn’t forget.

Gavin came back with the med kit and passed it to Jack. Ryan took it from him and made him sit down in the chair next to the one Alt-Geoff was resting his leg on.

“Geoff, other Geoff,” Ryan clarified, “would you mind patching up Jack while I take care of my Geoff?”

“ _My Geoff_ ,” Alt-Geoff said, “I like the sound of that.”

“Shush, and hold this against your leg.”

Jack made some protesting noises at Ryan but Geoff shot him a stern glare and he held up his uninjured arm in surrender.

Geoff took up residence on the table next to him so he’d be at a good height to tend to the shoulder. He wasn’t as great a medic as Jack or Michael, and he didn’t have the steady hand for stitching like Ryan did, but he’d patched up his crewmembers for years.

That excluded a brief few times in Zancudo, where it was beneficial to let someone die quickly of their wounds than to patch them up. Most of the time dealing with that was as simple as letting your guard down and a soldier or fighter jet would take care of the problem for you, but that wasn’t every time. That was something you grit your teeth through and when you saw them again on the other side of the red flash you’d take an extra moment to make sure they were whole and hearty.

But anyway, Geoff had patched up his crewmembers for years.

“The whole west coast?” Geoff queried, and Jack welcomed the distraction from what Geoff was doing to his arm. He also accepted the glass of whiskey Gavin poured for him, and took a slow sip.

“A generous peace offering, we thought.” Jack said. “There’s been a lot of fighting out west, and we’re not exactly in a position to travel that far out just to defend a few little used jetties and small businesses.”

“Too generous an offer makes you look weak.” Geoff told him. “But judging by today’s events they already thought that.”

“What would you have done, then?”

“I’d have given them the western suburbs.” Geoff explained. “Not only would they be a bit more inland, but also closer to your home base here.”

“Why is that a good idea?”

“Give ‘em the low lying suburbs while you keep the higher density commercial district. You can keep a close eye on their movements from there. With the deal made, the fighting stops along the coast, and Funhaus themselves acts as a barrier of defence from other crews.”

Jack hummed his approval of the plan, then stopped to wince when Geoff pressed a little too hard into his shoulder. He took another sip of his drink.

“You came up with that pretty quickly.”

“Yeah, well.” Geoff placed an adhesive patch over the wound. Just a deep graze where Jack must’ve fallen on his shoulder. There’d been gravel embedded in the wound, and he smelled like smoke and motor oil and iron. “Not the first Fakes to have that problem.”

Alt-Geoff snorted. “I hope they’re having better luck than us with it.”

Geoff pursed his lips. “Yeah, actually. They are. My original universe, okay well not my original universe, the most recent one I call home, we had a great relationship with Funhaus and the other local crews. I don’t know why the Fakes I’ve seen since then have had…”

“…Worse luck?” Ryan ventured.

“Well I mean I doubt ol’ Geoff here is leading you astray.” Geoff glanced at Alt-Geoff, who looked significantly less in pain and equal amounts tipsy. “He’s me after all. In certain ways.”

Gavin spoke up. “What happened to your original universe?”

“Dunno.” Geoff replied. “Ray said he knew Lindsay was doing just fine, and burned Zancudo down after you Lads didn’t come home. I imagine people like Burnie and Gus are doing just fine. They’re capable. They wouldn’t miss me for long-“

Geoff cut himself off to swallow heavily.

“Can’t do anything about them so I shouldn’t worry, right? Look, maybe we should be thinking about what next to do about Funhaus.”

 

* * *

 

This universe looked remarkably like the previous one.

 

* * *

 

“Christ, really?” Geoff griped. “What happened to the penthouse?”

“Well _excuse me_ ,” Alt-Geoff drawled, “not all of the Fakes have a million fucking dollars laying around to spend on one.”

Once these Fakes had watched all the videos on the USB and determined Geoff wasn’t a threat, he was allowed to look around the flat. The apartment was… quaint, compared to Geoff’s standards. This was the sort of apartment he’d pick as a safehouse but not to live in permanently.

This was the first big change in the Fakes that Geoff could spot off the bat. He wasn’t sure at this point if it was because Funhaus was getting powerful, or if the Fakes were just getting unluckier. It probably didn’t matter. Geoff didn’t intend on hanging around long enough for it to be a problem for him.

What was a problem for him already was that this meant the timeline was getting fuckier. The more things changed, the less familiar Geoff was with the future. And each universe where the situation was harder and harder for the Fakes made Geoff feel further and further away from his own crew.

He’d been lucky up until now to catch the Fakes in a quiet moment in their penthouse. Hopefully he’d get away from this pit of alien-free universes before the fighting with Funhaus escalated, when his crew grew too weak to hold them back. Geoff was not looking forward to appearing in a universe in the middle of a gunfight.

Although, Geoff already wished he was back experiencing more of the same-same nature of the last couple of dozen universes as opposed to this degradation of his crew’s standing in this one. It was an affront to everything he worked hard towards. Everything his crew had achieved.

“No, you don’t-“ Geoff shook his head. “Do you think I give out millions of dollars all willy-nilly? Or that I’ve ever had that kind of cash on hand? You point your damned gun at the building owner until you make a deal! You run a criminal empire! Break a law or two!”

Someone, either Jack or Ryan, snorted in the background.

“You don’t think we tried that? We got caught!” Alt-Geoff argued back.

Geoff ran a hand over his face. “How on earth did you get caught?”

“Yeah, _we_ got caught,” Michael cut in, dripping with sarcasm. “It _definitely_ wasn’t just Geoff. We had to spend a small fortune posting his bail. Then the lawyers, the bribery, yadda yadda. We were lucky to even get this place.”

Alt-Geoff crossed his arms. “I’m not going to apologise for putting life and limb on the line for this crew.”

“How about getting arrested, then?”

Alt-Geoff flipped him off.

“Oh like your record’s so spick and span. There’s no one in this room that the police don’t have some dirt on.”

“Wait,” Geoff said, “what? What about Gavin and Jeremy? Do the police know about them as well?”

“The LSPD have arrested all of us at some point,” Ryan explained. “They keep tabs on us. It kinda makes it difficult to run our, as you would say, criminal empire.”

Michael punched him on the shoulder. “Criminal small town.”

Ryan smiled back at him. “Criminal hamlet.”

Geoff waved his hand to get Ryan’s attention. “Do they know you’re the Vagabond?”

“Nah, I wasn’t wearing the mask at the time.”

“Why don’t you just ask Gavin to hack their records and make the charges disappear? It’s the only way my Fakes can get anything done. That and bribery. And murder.”

“Can’t.” Jack said. “Gavin’s good, but they’re the _police_. Plus, does it look like we have the money to spare for bribery? Funhaus is bleeding us dry.”

Geoff’s eyebrows shot up. “You _work_ for Funhaus?”

“Of course not.” Alt-Geoff scoffed. “But they’re getting into fights with our guys in the western suburbs and ammunition is expensive. They blew up our safehouse out there and’ve killed a few new hires. And the cops know our faces so we can’t just turn up there armed to the teeth. We get arrested again, we go away for a long time.”

“But Geoff,” Michael said to Alt-Geoff, “You have some idea about what we’re gonna do, right?”

Alt-Geoff’s expression darkened. “I need to speak with Lindsay and Trevor and see what they’ve got. I might have something in the works.”

Geoff knew that tone of voice meant he was bullshitting. From the look on Jack’s face, he knew it too.

Geoff didn’t like it one bit.

“Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do.” Geoff raised his voice a little. “We’re gonna wait for Gavin and Jeremy to come back, and then we’ll sit down and talk through what makes this universe different from mine. That way, I’ll know how two universes work and you’ll have two Geoffs to think up a plan. Does that work for you all?”

Jack, Ryan, and Michael looked to Alt-Geoff for confirmation.

“Yep,” Alt-Geoff said, “works for me.”

 

* * *

 

The Geoff native to this universe doesn’t drink either.

That doesn’t stop anybody else, which is fine, but Geoff was getting pretty tired of gently trying to cajole Jeremy into drinking some water and convincing him that yes, he was aware it was hilarious he could literally go fuck himself.

“There’s a quiz online,” Jeremy called out from across the coffee table, “I’ll find it for you. About clones!”

“It doesn’t matter,” Geoff shouted back, “Your Geoff isn’t my clone so it doesn’t apply.”

“It’s close enough!”

“I am in a committed relationship, thank you very much.”

“It’s a hypothetical, jeez. You should be used to them, ‘cause there’s a Gavin in your universe too.”

“Far too used to them.” Geoff agreed. “I’ve taken Ryan’s stance to them and started interpreting them way too literally.”

“Come on, bring it back,” Ryan made a circling gesture with his arm. “We were talking about how we met?”

“I saved your asses,” Jeremy slurred.

“You saved mine too.” Geoff told him. “But I think we were talking about the bank robbery.”

“Because that’s where you and your Fakes became enemies, right?” Jack asked.

“Yeah. So I don’t know how that helped you six…” Geoff threaded his fingers together, “…join forces. And then Jeremy later.”

“Ray always told the story best.” Gavin said. He was typing away on a laptop, his feet up and crossed on the coffee table. “He was the one that shot the helicopter down, after all.”

“Ray always liked that rocket launcher a bit too much, if you ask me.” Geoff sipped his soda water.

“…Rocket launcher?” Ryan queried.

“Yeah, you know,” Geoff mimed holding a long cylinder over one shoulder, “shoots rockets. Not great for indoors.”

“Ray never owned a rocket launcher,” Michael said, “where the hell would he get one of those?”

“I don’t know,” Geoff replied, “I don’t suppose you can just buy one at an Ammunation. Black market dealer maybe?”

“It’s not important.” Ryan said. “Did he crash the helicopter into your bank as well?”

“Yeah, it hit the side, Ray told me.”

“Not in our universe.”

There it is - that’s the main difference. Ray made the choice not to get the rocket launcher in this universe and his Fakes didn’t need Zancudo to get together. Ray chose to leave just before the early conflict with Colmillo Blanco, and they hired Jeremy to replace him. Those things sounded on par with not only the other universes visited, but Geoff’s own home universe.

“What happened?” Geoff asked.

“Ray sniped the helicopter and it hit the bank’s roof and fell through.” Michael explained. “The front of the building collapsed, and everyone but Ray was trapped inside. The money got stuck under the rubble, so we just kind of helped each other get out? A couple of civilians too. The cop cars sent to stop us even helped us clear out of there.”

“Cops helped you?”

“Yeah, we probably looked like innocent civilians. Dipshits.”

“No, I’m just saying. Ray killed all the cops before we made it out the front door of our bank. If your Ray didn’t, could those cops be the ones that are giving you grief?”

“I think so.” Gavin said over whatever Michael was going to say. He spun his laptop around and showed them information pages about the cops. “Soon after the bank incident, they requested desk jobs in the department. One of them turned out to be a great system admin and seriously boosted the LSPD’s digital security not long after.”

“Not humorously?” Michael interjected. Ryan kicked him.

Alt-Geoff leaned back in his chair. “If he’s so good, then how’d you nab that info so quickly?”

“It’s on the About page on the local LSPD website.”

“Oh.”

“So…” Geoff said slowly, “The police terrify you because… they have a great I.T department?”

Gavin nodded. “That’s about right. Even with Ryan’s help I haven’t been able to touch the LSPD’s servers.”

Geoff leaned back in his chair. “Okay then, I see a clear solution to your problem.”

“Which is?” Alt-Geoff prompts.

“Take out the I.T department.”

“You wanna bust down the door of the LSPD,” Alt-Geoff said, “and kill their cops, while they’re surrounded by other cops. I know you said you had an idea, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have a good one.”

Geoff glanced at his left arm. The hypercube adorning it shone with its full, purple light.

“It’s a pretty good one. Do you want to free up your time to deal with Funhaus or not?”

 

* * *

 

Geoff walked right through the LSPD’s front door like he owned the place.

“Hello,” he told the receptionist, “I’d like to report a missing vehicle.”

“Can I grab some I.D off you, if that’s okay?”

“Absolutely.”

Geoff fished around in his backpack and handed over his driver’s license. He wasn’t lying- he was Geoff Ramsey. His new vehicle, which he bought last night, was no longer in his garage and he didn’t know where it was. The I.D passed whatever security check the receptionist’s computer wanted it to and she gave him the required forms.

“Okay, just fill out this form over there,” the receptionist pointed, “and we’ll see what we can do. Okay?”

“Yep, great.” Geoff replied. He gave a quick wave to the security camera and then headed to the indicated area.

The far wall caved in as a dump truck suddenly intruded on the space. A verifiable wall of dust and debris rained down from the cheap ceiling tiles as they broke apart. The screech of the dump’s brakes echoed in the small space and Geoff covered his ears.

That did nothing to cover Alt-Geoff’s excited shout over the comms when he recovered from the impact.

“Holy shit!” Geoff shouted into his earpiece. Geoff winced. “That was the coolest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life!”

“If I get tinnitus from that,” Geoff said back, “I’m gonna tell your entire crew about that thing you did with your dick and the toilet seat when you were a teenager.”

“Duly noted.”

“The server room?” Jack asked.

“Nothing but dust.” Alt-Geoff replied. “Team Love n Stuff, inspect the damage.”

Ryan and Gavin jumped down from the dump truck and cast careful eyes over the next room. Geoff could make out their silhouettes from the waiting room but not much more. His role was to look like a terrified civilian and help get the innocents away from the danger, not watch Gavin and Ryan do their jobs.

Typically, Geoff was fine to let the cops do what they needed to do and otherwise let them be. The only time he interacted with them was when they got in his way, and then they were fair game.

They were getting in the way now, so they had to go. It was simple enough.

The Police Commissioner darted out of his office and Ryan shot him. Gavin lit a Molotov cocktail and tossed it into the office space, closing the door behind him. An orange glow framed the outline of his skin.

“Yeah, no technological worries out our end.” Ryan said into his comms. Geoff heard it echo through his own earpiece, on the other side of the rubble. Two armed cops darted past him towards the half-buried exit, but paid him no mind. They were focused on getting out like he himself should be, but he wanted to see the Fakes in action in a way he hadn’t before.

“What Ryan said,” Gavin confirmed. “No salvageable computer stuff here. Bloody good job with the dump truck.”

“ _Thank_ you.” Alt-Geoff replied.

“Server guy’s carked it.” Michael said over the comms. “Clean one through the head.”

“Great job.” Alt-Geoff coughed. “And the other three guys?”

“Jeremy’s working on them. You know, he’s really turned into a half decent sniper, I’d say.”

“Two down!” Jeremy said. “Dunno where the last one’s at. He’s yours, Michael. Half decent sniper my ass, do your job.”

Jeremy’s reply was almost covered with static, but Geoff was able to make it out. Stupid un-alien tech.

“Got him!” Michael said. “He got me back with his knife a bit, but not enough. Jack, you on hand?”

“Yep.”

“Then no worries.”

“Okay, we’re done here,” Geoff surreptitiously said to his comms, “clear out!”

“In a sec,” Alt-Geoff said. The dump’s engine revved up and the battered thing made a slow crawl towards the next wall. The pile of debris inched closer and Geoff took a cautious step backwards. “I have a bit more building I wanna destroy.”

“Geoff-“ Geoff said.

“Geoff.” Alt-Geoff replied. “You might want to make a hasty exit now. I’m sure enough witnesses have seen you in there and not in here, now.”

“Alright, fine.” Geoff said. He made a show of helping some civilian out of the smoke and deposited him near the other civilians. “I’ll make sure you survive this or my name isn’t Geoff Ramsey.” He told the civilian.

Geoff made his way away from the crowd and around a convenient corner. “Your cover story should hold up.” Geoff said to Alt-Geoff over the comms.

“Great. No new charges to file against me.” Alt-Geoff replied. “Not sure where they’d file them, though, considering in about five seconds there won’t be any police station left.”

Geoff wasn’t sure what was louder in his ear: his alternate self’s giggling or the sound of the police station tumbling down behind him.

“Yep, great job.” Geoff said.

“Why didn’t I think of this earlier?” Alt-Geoff said. “Dump trucks are fucking awesome!”

“You haven’t spent as much time hanging around construction sites as I have.” Geoff replied.

“Don’t brag about it.”

“I’m not!” Geoff argued.

God, it sounded like old times. Geoff wished he could stay here, forever. Do more jobs, deal with enemy crews. Lead the Fakes. This crew wasn’t _his_ crew, he had to keep reminding himself. No matter how much fun he had with them.

It wasn’t his job to lead them, here. That was Alt-Geoff’s. He had something else to do. Something he almost forgot about in the excitement around the police station.

It was time to go.

“Okay, hey,” Geoff said, “do you know the corner between Strawberry Ave and Vespucci Boulevard?”

“Yeah, why?” Alt-Geoff said.

“I’m leaving an envelope filled with money in this storm drain here, okay?”

It was money the Alt-Geoffs from other universes had given him in case of an emergency, but he figured the Alt-Geoff of this universe could use it more.

“What?” Why?” Alt-Geoff asked.

“Other Geoff, wait a sec,” Jack said over his comms. Jack, always more perceptive than anyone else in the crew,

“Nah.” Geoff said. “You’ve got enough advantage over the LSPD to take care of Funhaus now, I think. No point in sticking around.”

“Not even to say goodbye to us all?”

“I’ve done that more times than you can count. I’m not great at them.” Geoff said. “I don’t have anything heartfelt to say. You all know what you’re doing, what you need to do.”

“Do you?”

“I need to move on.” Geoff said. He heaved his backpack higher over his shoulder. “From uh, this universe. Leave this universe. Need to find that alien technology, you know? Yeah.”

“Yeah, we understand.” Ryan said. “Thanks for helping us out, Geoff.”

“Helping my Fakes is kind of my job, Ryan.” Geoff said, a smile in his voice. “But yes. I’ll see you around, okay?”

“Geoff-“

Best to leave before the rest of them joined in.

Geoff spun the hypercube and the world unravelled.

 

* * *

 

Geoff opened his eyes to an enclosed space filled with paper. He sat on the floor next to a typical office chair filled with a very confused Alt-Geoff blinking back at him, before lunging at him out of his office chair.

“Um-“ Was all Geoff had the time to gasp out before the full weight of Alt-Geoff, for some reason in an LSPD police uniform, bore down on him and twisted his hands behind his back.

Alt-Geoff smushed Geoff’s face down into the carpet.

“Los Santos Police Department! How the hell did you manage to sneak into my office?!”

“What?” Geoff wheezed.

He looked around. A bunch of papers had blown off a desk with Geoff’s arrival, and Geoff was confronted with the image of a dead man with an eye patch, monocle, and fantastic moustache, and a building long since demolished. Alt-Geoff crushed the rest of the oxygen out of his lungs and he focused back again at the situation at hand.

“You are under arrest,” Alt-Geoff told him, “for breaking and entering the Los Santos Police Station in Downtown Los Santos. And, potentially, for impersonating a police officer. You have the right to remain silent…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Screw it, I changed my mind, it all stays. There'll be 30 or so chapters.


	5. Type 2A - Chirality 3

The handcuffs, Geoff noted, were not regulation handcuffs. They were stiff in the middle, plastic and metal instead of chain, and Geoff couldn’t even brush his fingers against his opposite wrist. This was done to keep his hands away from the hypercube, which he presumed had started glowing again, not that he could see it with his hands behind his back. While the cops here couldn’t remove it they were smart enough not to let him touch it.

Not that he could, even if he wanted to. Maybe if his hands were cuffed in front of him instead of behind him around the back of a chair, and he wiggled a bit? Eventually they’d have to leave him alone and then he could work his hands in front of him. But for now, as they had for the last few hours, Officers Haywood and Dooley were glaring daggers into the back of his neck from their positions next to the door behind him, and it made his neck tingle. There would be no escape attempts while they were watching.

But even if he could use the hypercube, Geoff wouldn’t. He wasn’t going to leave without his backpack, which he supposed was in an evidence locker somewhere else in the police department.

The trick would be in convincing Alt-Geoff, his interrogator, to go look at the videos on the USB and then let him go. But currently, his alternate self was far more interested in asking Geoff about his past and his personal life than about the how and why he existed. For the past few hours Geoff had regaled the three officers with stories about his rise to the top of the Los Santos underground.

He kept most of the alien technology and universe jumping stuff out of it. They’d understand once they saw the videos and if he brought it up before then he’d look like a crazy person. Plus, it was more fun to tell them the various ways he’d outwitted his own LSPD and made them look like fools.

Sure they were his crew, but they were also cops. Fuck ‘em.

“These are European, right?” Geoff said, banging the handcuffs against the back of the chair. They clanged against some exposed bit of metal, and he found the noise annoying so he did it a few more times, just to see if he could get Alt-Geoff’s expression to change. “They’re comfy. And they can hold a note.”

Alt-Geoff didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow.

He did, however, slide Geoff’s phone across the table towards Geoff. It was unlocked, and the photo of the Lads and Jack playing _Hitman_ was on the screen. Geoff narrowed his eyes for a moment before he remembered Alt-Geoff had the same fingerprints as him.

“Care to explain this?” Alt-Geoff said.

Geoff leaned over as far as he could in the chair and looked down his nose at the phone. He gave it a small nod and lifted his eyes again to meet Alt-Geoff’s.

“It’s a phone.” Geoff explained. “You use it to call people. Well, I don’t. I use it to take pictures of my boyfriends and scroll through Twitter.”

Alt-Geoff ignored Geoff’s attempts at pedantry. “You have a bunch of real pretty looking boyfriends, but you only take three pictures of them?”

“If I say “take pictures” it implies more than one, of which three is.”

“They look a lot like _my_ boyfriends.”

“Then you have good taste.”

Alt-Geoff’s façade was impenetrable. Geoff heard Jeremy move around a little bit behind him, probably grinning like a madman. Ryan, Geoff knew, had the world’s worst poker face under the mask but he wasn’t wearing one here. Maybe he was, just a bit more metaphorically.

But Alt-Geoff didn’t have a hint of humour in his expression. His eyes were dead and calculating in a way that made Geoff doubt he was looking at his own face. It almost surprised him to hear Alt-Geoff was in the same relationship that he was, because he couldn’t image this Geoff being anything but a leader. It didn’t feel like there was room for anyone to stand on equal footing with him, the way he acted.

Maybe it was because he was at work. It might be a police thing. But Geoff himself had never revelled in giving orders, nor did it with the ease that Alt-Geoff ordered Ryan and Jeremy.

Even if he didn’t like it, Geoff couldn’t deny they made a well-oiled machine. He wondered what they were like when Jack, Gavin, and Michael were working with them at the same time. If Ryan and Jeremy were here, odds were the others were as well. He hated to think of them like that, here, instead of where they should be. Fakes made much better criminals than cops.

“Alright,” Geoff said. If he could’ve slapped his hands down on the table he would have. As it was, he had to settle for crossing his legs. “I’m getting real sick of the whole cop routine. Can we just get this out in the open? In what universe would I choose to be a fucking cop?”

Alt-Geoff remained impassive. “If you’re sick of me asking you questions, you could try answering them properly.”

“I told you,” Geoff slowed his words down, “everything you need to know is on that USB.”

Alt-Geoff spoke with the same tempo. “And once Detective Free can safely say it’s not carrying anything that could affect the security of our systems, we’ll look at it.”

“That shouldn’t take this long.” Geoff said, frowning. “It’s just a USB. Gavin should’ve figured that out in about two seconds.” Geoff looked up, realisation in his eyes. “Unless, of course, you never gave it to your tech team.”

Alt-Geoff said nothing.

“That’s why I’m not in regulation cuffs.” Geoff continued. “Why I’m in this interview room instead of going through processing. No lawyer. Why I’ve only seen you and, presumably, your two most trustworthy lackeys. You’ve kept me off the books, haven’t you?” Geoff grinned. “ _Bad cop_.”

Alt-Geoff stared at him, calculating. Ah, it felt good to get one over the cop. Alt-Geoff tapped his fingertips on the table top and his shoulders slumped a little from their posture-perfect position.

“You are… difficult to explain.” Alt-Geoff admitted. “And you’re dangerous. You look like me, you sound like me, you have a lot of my memories. Plus there’s that weird doohickie on your arm that nobody can remove or knows what it does. You stay right where I can see you.”

“You can’t just give me my stuff back and let me go?” Geoff said. “I can be out of your well maintained moustache in a jiffy. No more difficult to explain problem. And everything you could want to know is on the-“

“-I don’t really care how, or why, you’re here.” Alt-Geoff said, cutting him off.

“Then why spend a couple of hours sitting and interviewing me?”

“Because you’re a crook.” Alt-Geoff said. “A crook who made his way to the top of some other Los Santos. Someone smart enough to run circles around the LSPD. Well, one that doesn’t have me or my team in it. And, someone who brought Arcadius tumbling down and got away with it.”

Geoff remembered the papers he’d seen on Alt-Geoff’s desk. He put the puzzle pieces together.

“You want my help in taking down the Corpirate, is that right?”

Alt-Geoff gave the slightest of nods.

“I needed to see if you’d be amenable to an arrangement. And that you were capable of fulfilling the requirements of that arrangement.”

“And if I’m not amenable?”

Alt-Geoff heaved a practiced and smoothly acted sigh. “Then I guess we’ll just have to go through the formal arrest process and deal with all that. I know you’ve said you can just use that thing on your arm and vanish, but I get the feeling you would’ve done that if you could’ve.”

Alt-Geoff was right, almost. The only thing keeping Geoff in this universe was the backpack. Well, that and the handcuffs. But again, not like they could keep him in them forever.

“Yeah, right.” Geoff said. “Arrest me? Security cameras will prove I didn’t break in. What would you even charge me with?”

Alt-Geoff gestured and Ryan stepped into view. He tossed a manila folder onto the table.

“We caught you with an unlicensed firearm, a knife, and fake I.Ds, in the Deputy Police Chief’s office. Which you, in the eyes of the law if not any security cameras, broke into. Do you want me to keep going?”

“Honey, I’ll commit every crime in the book if it means you’ll read them back to me.” Geoff replied, sweet as sugar.

Ryan flushed.

Geoff smirked.

Alt-Geoff suddenly looked a lot less passive and a lot more aggressive.

“That’s option B.” Alt-Geoff said in a tone that was too light. “There’s also option C. Here,” Alt-Geoff nodded towards a back corner and Geoff craned his neck around to see what he was looking at.

Quick as a flash Jeremy came up on his other side and stuffed something into his mouth. Fabric, like a wadded up tie. Before Geoff could try and dislodge it Jeremy tipped his chair backwards and Geoff was scrambling to keep his balance and not bash his skull into the laminate. Jeremy held the chair steady just as it overbalanced and Geoff’s stomach lurched. His legs split apart to try and find the ground, and his toes just barely scraped against it.

Alt-Geoff leaned close, one of his hands coming down on the edge of the seat between Geoff’s legs. “Did you know this interview room is in the old part of the department? Not much down this end. I could issue a warning that this end’s dangerous, and then no one would come down here.”

Geoff fought to keep his breathing even and a neutral expression on his face.

Alt-Geoff indicated to something outside of Geoff’s sightline. “Maybe you’ll use your doohickie as soon as you get out of those cuffs. But over there, there’s two pipes running down that wall, a fair way apart. I could string you up between them so your arms were outstretched. No chance of reaching that little cube thing then, right? We can stick something in your arm and keep you hydrated. You could stay there for a very long time, don’t you think?”

Mute, Geoff nodded. It was hard to focus on what Alt-Geoff was saying and not choke at the same time.

“Keep your flirty comments to yourself from now on.”

Geoff nodded again.

“Okay, good. Officer Dooley?”

Jeremy returned the chair to its original position.

Alt-Geoff took the gag out of Geoff’s mouth and folded it up while Geoff worked some moisture back into his mouth. Cold sweat dripped down Geoff’s forehead. He flicked wet hair out of his eyes.

If either of the other two men in the room had done the same thing Geoff would be feeling _very_ conflicted right now. But it was Alt-Geoff, so Geoff settled on trying to regain a little bit of control over his situation.

Geoff had faced down worse, with less.

 “What do you feel like doing, Geoff?” Alt-Geoff said. “A, B, or C?”

Geoff took a moment to sit up straight and square his shoulders. He stared Alt-Geoff down, even from his seated position, one gang leader to another.

“The backpack,” Geoff said, voice only a little unsteady. “I’m not leaving this universe until I get it back. I can help you deal with the Corpirate as long as afterwards you return it.”

Alt-Geoff appeared to mull it over, his hand twitching like he wanted to fiddle with his moustache but the habit was almost trained out of him.

Geoff leaned forward and lowered his voice until hopefully only Alt-Geoff could hear it.

“I wouldn’t do it for _you_ , Officer Ramsey,” Geoff half snarled, half whispered. “But I’d do it for _my_ crew, and _my_ city. Nobody is allowed to threaten them and get away with it, do you understand?”

There was enough honesty in his words for Alt-Geoff to recognise, Geoff could see. Nodding again, Alt-Geoff motioned to Jeremy.

“Un-cuff him, Dooley.”

Jeremy did so and Geoff shook the tingles out of his arms. He rubbed at the red marks around his wrists and sort of nodded at Jeremy and Ryan. He wasn’t sure why. It seemed polite.

“Alright,” Geoff said, “the sooner we start the sooner I can fuck off. If you get me a pen and paper I can draw up a rough guide to the fastest way up Arcadius-“

-“That’s not what I need from you.” Alt-Geoff cut him off.

“Then what do you need my help with?”

“I need you to impersonate me while I frame the Corpirate.”

 

* * *

 

When it was convenient to do so, they snuck Geoff out of the police station and to Ryan’s apartment, which was closest. Jeremy ordered some fast food and they went over Alt-Geoff’s idea while they waited for the other three to turn up.

“We can’t get anything to stick to him,” Alt-Geoff explained as he took his jacket off, “he’s too good at covering his tracks.”

“We had the same problem.” Geoff replied.

Jeremy offered him a beer and Geoff waved him away. He gave it to Alt-Geoff, who accepted and offered a chaste kiss as payment.

Alt-Geoff certainly looked more like… himself, now. Far more relaxed and less looming. Even in Ryan’s apartment, which looked bare of personal items and personality, there was a lot of exposed brick, these three Fakes looked comfortable.

‘As much as I’d like to go up there, guns blazing,” Jeremy said, “and take him down, we just don’t have enough evidence. At least, nothing more than for a few white-collar crimes, and that’ll only take him down for a few months at most.”

“But then he’ll just go back to committing all his regular crime, but with a vendetta against all of you.” Geoff said. “So you need proof he did something worse. Something that’d let you search Arcadius and find the real dirt you’re looking for.”

“Oh no,” Ryan said, “It’s not about the crime, really. Yes, that’s our goal but that’s not why we’re doing this.”

Geoff frowned. “Then why?”

“He’s got people working for him inside the station.” Ryan explained. “Tipping him off. Burying his secrets.”

Alt-Geoff placed his beer on the coffee table. “It’s like you said, Geoff. They’re mine.”

“The whole precinct?”

“As good as.”

The front door opened and Michael, Gavin, and Jack let themselves in. Michael carried the fast food Jeremy ordered, Jack a stack of papers, and Gavin a laptop.

“Jesus Christ,” Michael almost shouted, “one Geoff was bad enough. It’s fucking uncanny.”

“It’s pretty weird,” Jack agreed, “but exactly what we needed.”

“Okay,” Alt-Geoff brought attention back to himself, “here’s what we’re gonna do. I’ve organised to host a safety seminar tomorrow morning at the station. Lots of witnesses. Second Geoff here will talk at the safety seminar while I go off and frame the Corpirate.”

“Here, second Geoff,” Gavin passed over the laptop. On it was a PowerPoint presentation. “You know how this all works, right?”

Geoff rolled his eyes and turned to Alt-Geoff. “Here I am, criminal mastermind, and you want me to give a PowerPoint presentation? Why don’t you do that, and I’ll frame the Corpirate?”

“You don’t have a moustache.”

“Well you _do_ , and I’m meant to be impersonating you, so I don’t see how that’s gonna work.” Geoff closed the laptop. “This is stupid.”

“It’s not stupid.” Jack said with certainty. “Maybe you’re not aware because you’re not from around here, but everybody knows how much Geoff looks like the Corpirate, and how much he wants to take him down. Just shave off that beard, make an appearance at the station in the morning, and when someone with a moustache who looks a hell of a lot like the Corpirate commits a crime, you’re off the hook. Afterwards, the real Geoff will shave and none will be the wiser.”

Geoff reluctantly opened the laptop again.

“Real Geoff my ass. Fine.” Geoff pointed at Alt-Geoff. “But you’ll have to shave your head as well.”

“I can wear my officer’s cap for a few months.”

Jack piled his stack of papers onto Geoff’s lap.

“And what’s this?” Geoff asked him.

“Stuff you’ll need to know about us and police regulations for tomorrow.”

Geoff sighed and flicked through the stack while Jack continued.

“You know, you probably won’t even need get through the whole seminar. Once we have evidence of a crime, we’ll interrupt. We finally get our warrant and then you get your backpack back.”

“Hey,” Ryan called out. “Look what I found in my storeroom.”

It was an eyepatch.

Why the hell did he have one of- oh, right. Theatre days. Geoff wondered how long Ryan’d owned this apartment, and who else’s he spent more time in.

Alt-Geoff placed the eyepatch over one eye and swallowed a couple of times.

“Sometimes, you _can_ beat Wall Street.”

And that voice, with its hint of gravel and accent Geoff couldn’t quite place, drained the blood from his face and Geoff was thankful to be sitting down.

“All we need’s the monocle.” Michael said.

“Already got one.” Jack cut in and handed it over. Alt-Geoff inspected it and held up the lens to the light.

“Just wait a second.” Geoff said. “Would you mind just going over everything again once more for me?”

Alt-Geoff dropped the accent. “You’re dressing up as me, so at the same time I can dress up as the Corpirate and commit crime. The LSPD can then raid his home and business and get the real dirt on him. Then you get your backpack back. Is that clear?”

“Crystal, I suppose. Jesus, you came up with all this real quick.”

“It’s my job.” Alt-Geoff said. “I’m the guy who comes up with plans.” He picked his beer up to take another sip. “You and I together, second Geoff, could probably do a lot of good around here.”

 

* * *

 

Geoff was not super thrilled with first off, going back to the police station, let alone dressed as a cop and surrounded by cops he was forced to be nice to. He wasn’t looking forward to the seminar he’d have to speak at, or any of the other bureaucratic bullshit hoops Alt-Geoff was making him jump through. He didn’t like the way his crew changed from boyfriends to subordinates as soon as he stepped through the front entrance.

He didn’t mind the shave, though- he was well overdue.

“Why the hell did you become a cop, Ryan?” Geoff asked him as they set up the seminar room up. It was slow work with just the two of them, but it sure as hell beat every officer that walked past asking him what happened to his “glorious moustache”.

Also, Alt-Geoff’s cap kept falling over his eyes and Geoff had to keep fixing it up. This backpack better be worth it in the end.

“You would’ve been the Vagabond for years before joining up under Geoff.” Geoff continued. “And you love breaking the law.”

“That’s all true,” Ryan admitted. “But I got caught.”

“You.” Geoff deadpanned. “Caught. By _cops_.”

“I was… seduced into falling for a trap.” Ryan said. “Officer Ramsey offered to help clear my name if I put my skills to better use.”

“Under him.”

“Under him. It’s not a bad life.”

“Was it worth giving up being the Vagabond?”

“Oh darling,” Ryan winked at him, slow and dangerous, “who said I ever stopped?”

Geoff paused, a smile flitting across his features.

“Oh no,” Geoff said “you’re fucking with me, aren’t you.”

“Might be.” Ryan replied. “But you won’t stick around long enough to find out.”

“Can I order you to tell me the truth? I’m technically your superior right now.”

“You can try, I won’t stop you.”

It was quiet between them for a few minutes while they each line up chairs, until Ryan spoke again.

“That’s how he found all of us. Me and the Lads. Jack he brought with him.”

“To the LSPD?”

“Arrested for crimes that would put us away for decades, if not the rest of our lives, unless we agreed to work for him. That’s how most people in this precinct got their jobs.”

“He’s got dirt on all of you. And he’s hunting for the Corpirate next.”

“He’s very good at keeping people he wants close, and maintaining connections.” Ryan paused for a second. “I would be careful about letting him keep you close.”

“I’m not _letting_ him-“

“Yes, you are.” Ryan gestured towards the police jacket thrown over Geoff’s left arm, obscuring the hypercube from view. “Remember that, please.”

Geoff frowned, but conceded the point.

“You wanna know how I met _my_ Vagabond? I helped him _remove_ blackmail other people had on him.”

“Kind of you.”

“Yeah, well, it was to stop him from killing me and Jack, but it paid off. Worked with us for a couple of years, got closer, met the Lads, became something more.”

“How did you end up meeting the Lads, if you didn’t arrest them?”

Geoff clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “That’s a long story that involves Fort Zancudo, a different Corpirate, and about three hundred bottles of Ragga Rum. That’s when we really got to know them.”

“And then they joined your criminal empire?”

“Pretty much. You’d be surprised how well we all work together on the other side of the law.”

“I don’t think I would be, to be perfectly honest.” Ryan stopped to perfectly line up a chair against the others. His fingers slid down the side of the backrest, a fingernail tracing the edge of the metal. “You know, I’m not here anymore _just_ because of my initial reasons for signing up. Geoff’s really made something sweet here.”

Jack poked his head into the room and cleared his throat for their attention.

“People’ll start coming in in about five minutes. You all ready in here?”

“Just about.” Ryan called back. “God I hate these things.”

“You don’t even have to talk!”

“I’ll throw in a couple of innuendos for you,” Geoff said. “Keep everyone on their toes.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Yeah, well,” Geoff shrugged, “I’m gonna. I’d like to see them write up your great and mighty Officer Ramsey for insubordination.”

 

* * *

 

The seminar went fine. Geoff hated every second of it.

About twenty minutes into it Jack pulled him aside and whispered the evidence they needed had been recorded on a security camera down by the docks. Geoff called the seminar short and cops hurried to deal with the new situation.

“Oh, and Officer Ramsey,” Jack said to him, “I spoke with Officer Haywood. He said he found your jacket hanging up behind the door in your office.”

Geoff pointedly looked at the police jacket hanging off his arm.

“Um. Okay.”

“Behind the door, Officer Ramsey.”

Ah.

“Oh.”

“You should grab it before things really kick off around here,” Jack gave him a long look.

“Right, right, okay. I will, uh, go get it.”

Geoff allowed himself the luxury of squeezing Jack’s shoulder. “Thank you.”

Jack nodded his reply and returned to organising the rest of the officers.

As Geoff suspected, behind Alt-Geoff’s office door, hanging on a hook was Geoff’s backpack. Next to it also was his suit jacket and pants, which was a more minor detail but Geoff was happy to have them back. He left the police jacket on the hook and swapped it for his old clothes, donning the jacket and putting the pants away.

Everything was in there. Glock, Ryan’s knife, watch, phone, superglue. Thin box. Okay.

He filched the police badge Alt-Geoff had lent him too, sliding it into a side pocket of the backpack. Might prove to be useful in the future. He had a little look around the office until he found one of those concealed badge carriers and took that too.

Right. Time to get out of this miserable universe.

Geoff put a hand on the device and hesitated.

There might be another thing he can do here, actually. If he was lucky.

He made his way to the front desk and got the attention of the receptionist there.

“Excuse me,” Geoff asked politely, “do I have a vault, or a lock box around here that I use regularly?”

“Uh,” The receptionist blinked rapidly a few times, his eyebrows furrowing, “Not that I know of, but you do use the second evidence locker a lot. As far as I’m aware, you’re the only one allowed in. Is that right?”

“Yep, that’s perfect, thank you.”

“Why are you asking me about it?”

“Just making sure.”

Geoff found where it was located and opened it with Alt-Geoff’s I.D. Inside was filled with neatly filed paperwork and a few boxes of evidence, but the paperwork was what drew him here. He pulled out a random file and read it over.

“Matt Bragg… arrested for grand theft auto, arson, and grand larceny. Record expunged, July 6th, 2014.”

This was where Alt-Geoff stored all his blackmail. This was all the original reports and documentation that would’ve been replaced with more sanitised versions. Looks like Geoff did, in fact, get lucky.

“Well Alt-Geoff,” Geoff said to himself, “if this is that nice of a place as Ryan said, working under you, then they’ll do it without the blackmail.”

He pulled a lighter out of his pocket and set to work lighting every stack of paper he saw aflame. Once the room was filled with the cheery glow and acrid smoke made the nearest smoke detector begin its wail, Geoff tossed Alt-Geoff’s officer’s cap onto the blaze, and disappeared.

 

* * *

 

Geoff opened his eyes to a small room. His stomach rolled, and he couldn’t figure out why. He was on the floor next to bed, where a stunned Alt-Geoff was sitting holding a book.

Alt-Geoff blinked at him.

“Are you real? You look real. You’re _the_ Geoff, aren’t you.”

Geoff didn’t answer him quite yet. His attention was focused on the bed leg, where it was held down with titanium screws.

Geoff’s eyes darted to the door. Six bars.

A dripping tap.

A security camera in the far corner.

Geoff was below Arcadius.

Nope.

No.

Geoff wasn’t doing this again.

He _couldn’t_.

“Hey, hey,” Alt-Geoff said in a low tone, “if you’re real, go stand under the security camera. Blind spot.”

Gathering his wits, Geoff complied. He held his backpack against his knees and pressed his back against the corner of the cell, under the camera. He wrapped a hand around his Glock with an unsteady grip. He was worried he was going to drop it.

Alt-Geoff looked at him like he was a wild animal that needed to be calmed. He certainly felt like one. Breath too fast, eyes wild. Fingers twitching on the trigger.

He needed to get a grip.

“Arcadius?” Geoff choked out.

Alt-Geoff nodded.

“I take it you’re familiar.”

“We got out.”

“How?”

“Michael killed himself. There’s no audio recording for that camera, right?”

“No.” Alt-Geoff said. “Hey, I know this is a lot to ask, but we’ve been stuck here for months-“

-“You want me to kill you?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure. But I need you to answer some questions for me first. How much time do I have before someone finds out I’m here?”

Alt-Geoff pretended to resume reading, keeping up a charade for the camera.

“A guard comes past every half hour or so, and one went past ten minutes ago. I doubt anyone’s actually looking at the security footage right now, so you’ll probably have twenty minutes, tops. Just in case though, I’m gonna…” Alt-Geoff made a slight gesture with the book.

Geoff tightened his grip on the Glock. “That’s not enough time. That’s not enough- I can’t stay here, but I can’t leave yet.”

Geoff considered the Glock.

Alt-Geoff’s eyes flicked over to Geoff and then back to his book. “You’re not stuck in a loop like me, are you?”

“Not anymore.”

“They need me and the others alive. If we disappear, they’ll need you. They won’t kill you.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

Alt-Geoff twisted a few hairs of his moustache into place.

“Once you shoot me, all the guards will come running. Get out of here, turn left, then take a right and there’ll be a set of emergency exit stairs. Get an I.D badge off someone and you can make it all the way up. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah, yeah. Okay.” Geoff took a few deep breaths. “Also, just so you know. You do actually leave a corpse behind. You don’t just disappear.”

“Huh. I would’ve thought everything just kinda… transferred across. So what does change universes?”

“I don’t know,” Geoff replied, “other dimensions and strings are probably involved though. Hopefully enough to make us, us.”

“You don’t know?”

“I always felt like me,” Geoff admitted, “in the Zancudo loops. Even if technically it wasn’t my skin and bones.”

“Well it’s my skin now.” Alt-Geoff said. “Anybody who wants it will have to kill me for it.”

Geoff, despite himself, grinned a little.

Alt-Geoff closed his book.

“I keep feeling like you’re gonna disappear on me. Can we do this now then, please?”

“You ready?”

“Yeah. You know how you’re gonna get out of this cell?”

“Yep.” Geoff levelled the gun at him.

“Just-“ Alt-Geoff said, raising a hand.

“What?”

“We make it, right? You solved this,” Alt-Geoff gestured around him, “and this is something else?”

Geoff nodded. “We make it. The Corporate’s dead and we’re out of the loop. You’re gonna be fine, okay? Everyone’s gonna be fine and you’ll see them soon.” He paused for moment, then added “Don’t worry about Ray. Also, if you meet someone named Jeremy Dooley and he isn’t actively trying to kill you, trust him with your life. Everyone’s lives.”

“What happens to Ray?”

“I just said don’t worry about him, he’ll be fine. Don’t think too hard about it. Close your eyes, please.”

Alt-Geoff did so and Geoff shot him.

It was weird, it felt weird pulling the trigger, knowing it was his hand that did it but he couldn’t feel a thing. Could barely hear the bang and it echoing around the enclosed space, or the static in his ears afterwards. There was a little flash of light, Geoff remembered later, and that might’ve been from the gun, but it probably wasn’t.

It took a couple of seconds spent staring at the blood forming a puddle on the floor before Geoff snapped back to himself.

He had to get ready to move.

At least Alt-Geoff’s eyes were closed. That helped.

But his corpse looked emptier than any he’d seen before.

There would be panic, now, outside. The Corpirate’s six most valuable prisoners were gone and their device shattered. Guards would have heard the shot. Geoff braced himself next to the cell door and waited for a guard to approach.

Barely twenty seconds went past before running footsteps approached. Someone masculine swore. There was the sound of someone fumbling for his keys and as soon as the cell door opened Geoff shot him too.

Geoff took his I.D badge and his keys too, for good measure. Then he was out the door and sprinting towards the left end of the corridor.

Someone shouted behind him. An alarm started up.

Geoff paused at the end of the corridor long enough to check there was no-one down the left end of it before continuing down the right turn. Two guards were running towards him and Geoff lurched to a halt and fired. Two shots, two bodies. Geoff leapt over their corpses and carried on.

There was even signage pointing towards the emergency stairs. There were people just turning the distant corner but Geoff tapped the I.D card and was through the door before they could spot him. Hopefully.

He darted up three stairs and stopped.

The stairs ended with a blank wall just at the top of the flight.

There were no emergency stairs. It was a ruse just in case someone escaped; they could even follow the signage right to this point.

Geoff was trapped, and it was likely everyone in the facility would think to look here first.

“Fine, fine,” Geoff muttered to himself, “plan B. I need a plan B.”

He didn’t need to escape. He just needed to stay out of sight for a few short hours. This place was made up of storerooms and long, dark corridors. It shouldn’t be too difficult to find somewhere to hunker down.

Yep. That’s what he’ll do.

Geoff hit the two guards just as they tried to come through the door – one went down without a fight but the other staggered back safe in his body armour. Before he could recover, Geoff moved in with Ryan’s knife and sliced his gut open. The guard collapsed and Geoff took off back down the same way he came, reloading as he did.

He had to hide deeper in the facility. He couldn’t bear to go back down the corridor with his cell, but there was that initial left turn and the corridor that continued down the opposite way. Geoff sprinted past the opening but attracted the attention of the small crowd down the adjoining corridor, right near his cell.

He couldn’t fight them all at once. He needed to be out of sight, now.

Geoff hung a left, a right, and then another left. Broke the line of sight.

Not quite distantly enough, he heard shouting behind him.

“We’ve lost number seven too!”

“Fucking shit.”

There didn’t seem to be anyone in this part of the facility. The doors on either side thinned, the lights yellowed, the number of boxes and storage detritus stored by the walls increased.

The corridor spun sharply to the left. Geoff pushed off the opposite wall and stopped dead.

Geoff pulled his Glock up but he wasn’t quick enough.

A hand tore the gun out of his grip and threw it to the tiles.

Geoff froze.

There was a tall, insidious man standing before him, who’d been lying in wait around the corner. Geoff would’ve been able to pick him out of a crowd, any crowd, even a stadium full of people. Nobody else had the same height, the same bulk, the same red birthmark streaking across his face like a spray of blood. The same look in his eyes like he already knew all your worst secrets, all your biggest regrets and you hadn’t even opened your mouth yet. Like he’d figured out you were dirt and he was waiting for you to catch on.

Geoff had given him a half a dozen different names in the time they’d spent together during the longest fortnight of his life, most of them curses, but Michael’s always fit best.

The Inconvenience.

Geoff took a halting step back.

The Inconvenience took a measured step forwards.

Geoff bolted.

That hand that was so fast before shot back out and grabbed his backpack. Geoff whirled around and lashed out with Ryan’s knife. The strike was caught but Geoff twisted out of the grip, dropping the knife, and slithered out of the bag straps.

The backpack flew at Geoff and it cost him a precious second to push it away. A hand appeared around his throat and forced him backwards, back into the wall. Loose papers kicked up as his feet scrambled to find purchase but the other hand came up and tangled in his suit jacket, knuckles pressing uncomfortably against his collarbone, and the ground disappeared.

The air in his lungs vanished. Geoff brought his hands up to free himself but they were trembling, they were weak and panicked and he couldn’t think of anything else except _go, go, run_ , and there was darkness edging in on his peripheries.

The Inconvenience lowered his eyes to meet Geoff’s and there was the hint of a frown in his eyebrows.

“A shame, Mr Ramsey.” The Inconvenience said with measured care. “I almost expected better of you.”

Geoff wondered, briefly, how long and hard Alt-Geoff dreamed about running up those emergency stairs. About pelting up those however-many flights it was, legs burning like his lungs after so much inactivity, and finally seeing sunlight that was too bright and tasting unfiltered dirty city air.

Maybe, deep down, Alt-Geoff knew the only way to really escape The Inconvenience’s attention was death. That was why he didn’t offer to help Geoff more, try to leave here together and then sort himself out.

Maybe Geoff didn’t ask him to, because Geoff deep down knew the same thing.

And Geoff’s universe dissolved into darkness.


	6. Type 2A - Coupling Limit 1

Geoff came back to awareness slowly.

He dozed in and out of consciousness a couple of times with only the faintest recollection of words, movement, lights. Someone tugging on his arm. Fabric shifting. When he finally woke up the rest of the way it was to a very dry mouth and a persistent sluggishness that was a struggle to fight past.

But he did, because the second thing he registered was a familiar interrogation room and a table and he shifted instantly into high alert.

Geoff jerked in his seat, but he couldn’t move far. He looked down at himself, and found his arms gripped securely around his waist by the sleeves of a straightjacket.

He couldn’t reach the hypercube.

Which, he supposed, was the whole point, but that logical thought didn’t stop him from twisting around every which way and that in an attempt to reach it and get out of here, fuck his backpack. The hypercube glowed at full luminosity, which meant Geoff had been out for quite a while. Must have been stuck him with something while The Inconvenience had him, he guessed.

Christ. The Inconvenience. Geoff shouldn’t have been so surprised to see him, but then again, Geoff was used to the idea of him being dead.

If he gets out of this, and the next universe is like this one, Geoff doesn’t know what he’ll do.

In the meantime, The Inconvenience is probably going to come by, just like old times. Geoff half-heartedly kicked at the door, but that didn’t achieve anything so he sat back down. There was not much for him to do in the interim except fret about what will happen once The Inconvenience comes.

Nothing but work himself up into a panicked frenzy, because that’s what always happened before and The Inconvenience had months of practice with Alt-Geoff. At least him and his Gents and Lads are back in Zancudo now, together again.

Probably the only time Geoff’s going to think that again.

It also leaves Geoff wondering how much this universe’s Corpirate and Inconvenience know about alien technology, given they’ve had longer to study it than the pair in Geoff’s worst universe had.

Geoff supposed he’ll find out.

It took about another thirty minutes, by Geoff's reckoning, for the door to open and The Inconvenience to step inside. Geoff jumped a little at the noise, so tightly wound it surprised him, and schooled a glower on his face.

He could do this. He’s different now, a much stronger person. All he needs to do is tolerate The Inconvenience for a few hours, and then he can focus on figuring a way out of this.

The Inconvenience placed a leather briefcase on the table, and pulled out a manila folder and an expensive looking pen. Straightening his suit jacket, he settled down and commenced writing, and the only sound in the room was the gentle scratching of the pen across pages. Not once did he look at Geoff.

Geoff tolerated this for about ten minutes before breaking the silence as the sitting here, waiting, was going to kill him.

"Would you mind getting on with it?" Geoff said hotly.

The Inconvenience finished his paragraph before replying.

"You've had the option to speak whenever you've wanted to, Mr Ramsey." He slid a page back into the folder and withdrew another. "Don't feel as if you must wait for me to start."

"You're not even gonna say hello?"

"It has been made clear to me that we're already quite well acquainted. Would it help you feel like you've regained some control over your situation if I introduced myself?"

The Inconvenience looked up pointedly to draw attention to Geoff's position, and then resumed writing.

Some anger was useful. Geoff allowed some of his frustration to come up to the surface. Not enough to distract him, or make him careless, but he needed something to fight back the fear. He needed something to hold on to and give him just a bit of strength.

Geoff leaned forward and blew a sharp breath across the table top. A couple of pages flipped over and slid off towards the ground, including the one The Inconvenience was writing on.

The Inconvenience, very slowly and with deliberate care, capped the lid of his pen and placed it back in the briefcase.

"And to think I was concerned, Mr Ramsey," The Inconvenience said, "that I'd already ripped all the fight out of you."

"It comes back.” Geoff replied.

"I'm quite sure." The Inconvenience moved the briefcase to the side of the table, and now there was nothing between them. "If you don't mind me asking, how long did it take? For me to do my job, I mean. Feedback is always appreciated."

Geoff's fingers twitched inside the jacket. He didn't respond.

"I can tell you how long it took in this universe, if you'd like." The Inconvenience continued. "almost down to the minute. You and I. We've spent a lot of time together."

It was warm, in the jacket, and the room was too. But none of that stopped Geoff from shivering just then.

"Alt-Geoff, you mean." Geoff clarified.

The Inconvenience inclined his head. "Of course."

But his eyes never left Geoff's.

"Alt-Geoff. His Gents and the Lads." Geoff said. “They’ll be fine. You, the Corpirate, eventually it'll all just... fade. I haven’t thought about you in years."

"Mr. Ramsey," The Inconvenience chided, "you should know better than to lie to me.”

"That’s true. You’re right.” Geoff said. “I do think of you, often. And it’s with a smile on my face.”

“And why’s that?”

"Because I know what your corpse looks like."

"I'd imagine it looks like me," The Inconvenience said lightly. "now-"

"-Oh no, no." Geoff cut him off. "Not after Ryan was done with it."

For a flash, The Inconvenience looked uncomfortable.

Geoff smiled.

"Did you know what kind of noises come out of someone without a tongue? I didn't. Now I do. Presumably, for a short while, you did too."

"I imagine that would have been quite cathartic." The Inconvenience said. "Thank you for telling me. It's not every day you are presented with an opportunity to avenge your own death."

"I am literally one of the only people on the planet that you can’t say that to." Geoff said. "But fine by me.” Geoff straightened his back. “You want to think up some sick, twisted torture for me for revenge? Okay, go ahead. You want to kill me? You can. But the other people who helped kill you? Who you should wanna hurt just as bad? They’ll never know what happened here. You can't use me to hurt them, or vice versa, ever again."

The Inconvenience's eyes lit up. "You're alone."

Geoff froze.

"You're alone," The Inconvenience said again, "and your crew doesn’t know where you are, or what you’re doing. Are you using that hypercube to jump around universes, trying to look for them? Get home?"

Ice water trickled down Geoff’s spine. He’d screwed up. He thought he finally had the upper hand, but that clearly wasn’t the case. Just walked into another of The Inconvenience’s traps.

"And you were surprised to appear in my Mr Ramsey's cell." The Inconvenience fixed Geoff with a hard look. "You're not in control of where you're going. Just how far away from home are you?"

Geoff said nothing. He was sure his face said it all, anyway.

"And if you can't control where you're going, how exactly do you expect to get there? You're adrift. No one knows where you are. No one's coming for you. How do you really expect this to all turn out?"

Geoff had to look away.

"You're in denial, Mr Ramsey. You're not ever going home. And you can run through universes as fast as the hypercube will let you but it's not working. It isn't going to work, and you know it."

"Just shut the fuck up, would you?" Geoff snapped. "There’s a hell of a lot more to it than that.”

The Inconvenience looked down at Geoff through slitted eyes.

“Then enlighten me.”

Geoff glared at him.

“I don’t have to. I'm not here to play your stupid little games."

The Inconvenience leaned forward, splaying his hands across the table.

"Yes, you are. We can sit here, and I can explain to you exactly why you’ll never see your home again, even outside of your current predicament. We can talk until we’re both old and grey. Or,” The Inconvenience leaned back, “We could help each other. As much as I enjoy this whole song and dance, our time can be put to better use. We both want answers. My employer has a large scientific team working to understand the alien technology, and you have experience with more technology than we've encountered before. Together, we could get to the real heart of it all.”

“What’s the point of it for me, then?” Geoff asked. “If I’m gonna be stuck here forever.”

The Inconvenience bent over and picked up one of the papers Geoff had blown away. He flattened it, teasing one of the corners back into place. He slid it in front of Geoff.

On it was a rendering of the hypercube. Accompanying the image was a series of graphs, and some interpretations written in clear English next to them. In the margins, wild speculations about purpose, limitations, and possible other uses ran wild from half a dozen different pens. A small note in the corner detailed better ways of securing the broken piece, compounds that worked better than superglue. It even proposed one of them might restore the hypercube to full functionality.

And there was a recommendation, in The Inconvenience’s neat script, for the Corpirate to attempt to try using the helmet on it.

“Because, Mr Ramsey,” The Inconvenience said, “I haven’t ripped all the fight out of you yet.”

Geoff was still for about fifteen seconds, staring at the paper.

"Fine."

 

* * *

 

“The moment you appeared in Mr Ramsey’s cell, we detected a slight gravitational anomaly in the area.” The Inconvenience explained. “Not just in your cell, but in five others. I believe you can guess who occupied them.”

“Yeah, I think I can. They all leave bodies behind as well?”

“They did.”

“And the device shattered at the same time?”

“It did.”

“Nice.”

The Inconvenience stacked some papers in a neat pile. “If this information ever left this building, I believe string theorists across the globe would be pleased. A slight change in the local gravity is indicative that other spacial dimensions are involved, in a way that suits their research.”

“No, yeah, I knew that already,” Geoff said. He hooked an ankle around his chair leg and shifted closer to the table. “Alien technology is comprised of more branes, or something. More dimensions, more gravity. Makes sense there’s a bit of that involved when changing universes. That explanation’s a couple of years old though. Take it with a grain of salt.”

The Inconvenience raised an eyebrow. “And who gave that explanation?”

Geoff worried his lip. Yeah, no. He wasn’t going to throw Gus under the bus if he could avoid it. Since his crew was no longer here, it couldn’t hurt to give The Inconvenience some details, but still. “If you don’t know yet, then that’s something I can’t tell you.”

“So you have someone external you can discuss this with. Someone else you’re trying to protect, that’s still in this universe.”

If Geoff could’ve, he would’ve flipped him off. “I suppose.”

“It would work in your favour to co-operate to your best ability.”

“Yeah, like this could get any worse.”

“I need something useful to send to our researchers. We can’t remove the hypercube from your arm,” The Inconvenience shed his suit jacket and placed it over his chair’s back, “but I can always remove the arm, and send that to them.”

What is it with people and trying to cut his arm off? He’s been more worried about that limb in the last however many weeks than he had the rest of his life.

And The Inconvenience was giving him cause for concern as well. Once Geoff agreed to work together, it felt like he dropped a few layers of… himself. He was more casual, and Geoff couldn’t figure out what he wanted. Did he really want answers, or was this a new way to manipulate him? Either way, it was off putting.

“That’s not gonna work.” Geoff said, staring at the shed suit jacket. “The hypercube’s attached to my fourth dimension. It’s stuck with me.”

The Inconvenience shrugged. “I could do it anyway.”

“You need a hobby, man.”

The Inconvenience released a long, slow breath. “We’ll come back to this. In the meantime, I wanted to ask you about a signal-“

“Oh, the signal you got about me?” Geoff cut in. “Yeah, I know about that. You’re not the first one to get it.”

“Do you know who’s sending it?”

“Nope. I just know it’s looking for me, and this iteration of me specifically. Nor do I know what I did to attract their attention.”

“Do you think,” The Inconvenience said, “It might not be something you’ve done, but something you _will_ do?”

“Not likely.” Geoff replied. “Time travel’s not possible.”

“And yet, you exist right now in a time several years behind your native one.” The Inconvenience argued. “A few years ago, you knew nothing about other universes, or alien technology. Is it possible you don’t know everything about time as well?”

“It’s not really fair to call it my _native_ time,” Geoff said, “considering the one I came from isn’t my native universe.” The Inconvenience narrowed his eyes at that. “But you have a good point. Time may be a line, but so is a string.”

“It can twist and double back and loop over and over, and over again.” The Inconvenience finished.

Geoff inclined his head in agreement.

“It’s interesting how the signal differentiates between you and every other Mr Ramsey,” The Inconvenience said. He tapped his pen against his chin. “I wonder… are you familiar at all with the concept of string theory?”

Geoff screwed his face up.

“I _live_ string theory. Every time I use this,” Geoff tried to indicate at his arm but only succeeded in twisting his shoulders around, “string theory and I become well acquainted.”

“What is it like, travelling between universes?”

Geoff’s eyes dropped to the papers on the table.

“It’s getting ripped apart,” Geoff said. “Not just your body and your brain. It feels like your soul shatters into a million tiny strings. Emotions, memories, they all go. It’s quick but you can still feel it. And then suddenly you’re a person again, sitting next to a clone of yourself, or close enough.”

“That part interests me,” The Inconvenience said, “the security footage shows you appearing from inside the other Ramsey, but as far as our experts can tell nothing’s unusual about the corpse.”

“I just assumed the hypercube was dragging my whole body across instead of, like, just my consciousness or whatever like the original device.”

“Except that would put more matter, and so energy, into this universe and that’s impossible. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. I suppose there are ways to rearrange objects to make that happen, but that’s not possible either.”

Geoff raised an eyebrow at him. “A few months ago you knew nothing about alien technology and other universes. Maybe you just don’t know enough about, what was it? Rearranging objects?”

“There is a little more to it than that.” The Inconvenience said. “Take something and cut it into an infinite number of pieces. Split the pile of pieces into two. What’s half of infinity?”

“I don’t know and I don’t fucking care.”

“It’s infinity. Now, take one of the piles, with its infinite pieces, and rearrange them back into the original object. Do the same with the other pile. Which one is the original?”

“Still don’t know. But I would love to do that with, say, a gold bar. I’d get rich as shit.”

“And that’s why your description of changing universes will be of interest to our researchers. We didn’t make any headway with the other universe changing device,” The Inconvenience pointed at the hypercube, “but I don’t think the same will happen with that.”

“Wait,” Geoff said, “you didn’t end up doing anything to the original device?”

“We tried up until the point at which you made it explode.”

“Well you changed a setting or something within a fortnight in my universe.”

“Oh?” The Inconvenience asked. “I did?”

“The timing of the reset changing? That didn’t happen in this universe?”

“Apparently not.”

Geoff, as well as he could, shrugged.

“That kinda cements it for me.”

“Cements what?”

Geoff could feel a smug smile cross his face.

“That it looks like it doesn’t matter what you want, or what experts you have. The tech doesn’t care about you. All this alien technology? The spaceship crash? It was all for _me_. For me, by me, for me to do again.”

The Inconvenience steepled his fingers together.

“And to what end?”

There was a knock at the door.

The Inconvenience pursed his lips.

"Excuse me," he told Geoff, and approached the door.

"I was not anticipating any interruptions," The Inconvenience opened the door, "so this had better be-"

Lindsay Tuggey punched him right on the nose.

"You'd better believe it's fucking good," Lindsay said. She hefted a backpack over her shoulder while The Inconvenience staggered backwards, his nose bleeding. Lindsay strode into the room. "I've got a bone to pick with you."

Geoff stared at Lindsay with his mouth hanging open.

"Miss Tuggey," The Inconvenience said, blood dribbling down his chin. "number seven. How nice of you to join us."

"Shut up, shitcunt." Lindsay pulled Geoff's Glock out from behind her and shot him in the groin. "You're not the one I've got a bone for."

The Inconvenience grunted and collapsed to the floor, curling up.

"That came out wrong."

Lindsay swivelled the gun around to point at Geoff.

"Are they dead?"

Geoff spluttered for a few seconds, trying to find his voice.

“What?”

"My crew. Michael. Are they dead?"

"M-Michael?”

Lindsay strode the rest of the way over and pressed the gun against Geoff’s forehead.

“Reddish hair, freckles? Told me he trusted you _with his life_ , but I saw his _corpse_ in a _lab._ We _all_ did and _look what happened._ So you’ve got some explaining to do.”

“They all reset!” Geoff leaned away from the gun. “They’re all back in Zancudo, safe and sound. Look, just get me out of this stupid jacket and I’ll explain everything.”

“Nope. Here’s what we’re gonna do-“

There was an implosion, like all the air rushed out of the room and pushed its way back in at twice the speed, twice the heat.

“I may have set the lab on fire.” Lindsay said. “You help me get out of this hellhole and then I’ll take that off for ya.”

The Inconvenience groaned on the ground.

“Oh, hush it.” Lindsay told him.

“Okay, okay, fine.” Geoff said, standing. “But I don’t think I’m gonna be much use to you if I can’t hold a gun.”

“Nonsense,” Lindsay slipped a bag strap around his neck. “You’re my pack-horse. Come on, move it or lose it.”

“Wait, wait, hold on-“

“-That “lose it” was literal. I have no idea what fucking chemicals n’ shit I set on fire-“

“-Can you at least kill him before we go?” Geoff gestured at The Inconvenience with his foot.

Lindsay shot him in the neck. There was a lot of blood.

“Thanks.”

“Didn’t really do it for you, pal.”

They were halfway out the door before Lindsay stopped again.

“Oh yeah, one more thing. Remember to keep quiet, okay?”

“Okay?”

Lindsay vanished into thin fucking air.

Geoff made an aborted sound before a warm weight touched his shoulder and he vanished as well.

“Found this weird suit in the lab,” Lindsay whispered, “I can get it to work most of the time. Not too sure about two people.”

“It’s fine, I’ve seen this before. Prince James had something similar.”

“Who?”

Half a dozen guards sprinted around a corner. Lindsay pushed Geoff against the wall and they ran past without saying a word. One of them came close enough for Geoff to feel the wind of his passing.

The air grew warmer. Geoff detected a slight haze in the air.

“We’ll follow them.” Lindsay murmured.

Lindsay’s invisible hand on his shoulder, they made their way as quickly as they could hopefully towards an exit. They passed the original door Geoff tried, with the false exit, without slowing down.

Lindsay must’ve come down this way before. How long had she been wandering around down here, invisible? Knowing her crew was dead? Knowing the man responsible for it all was still sitting here, in a straightjacket?

They stopped frequently to allow people behind them to hurry past. As time went on, they had to stop at less frequent intervals. An alarm started up, but cut out quickly from the nearest speaker as most likely the heat got to it.

They scurried up a couple of staircases and the space opened up. Fewer corridors, more open rooms and laboratories to hurry past. Even more stairs, which Geoff’s legs ached in protest against.

Finally some signs told them they were close to a main entrance. Considering this was the same direction everyone else was running in, Geoff was inclined to believe them.

There was a grand staircase in the centre of the room which let in natural sunlight.

The surface.

Geoff knew of only one other time where seeing natural light had such an effect on him and this was really a close second.

This room was far more open and far more empty than the previous ones. There was only one other person in it and it lumbered to its feet.

It must’ve been eight feet tall, and was a dark grey in colour. It was very hairy, and sported a long red beard.

“Oh fuck.” Geoff said. “That’s the fucking gorilla-man.”

“Who in the _fuck?_ ” Lindsay said.

The gorilla-man sniffed at the air and turned towards them.

Lindsay dropped her hand from Geoff’s shoulder, presumably to hold Geoff’s Glock in two hands. Geoff could see himself again, which in any other circumstance except for this one would’ve been a good thing.

There were three gunshots.

Two missed, and the one that didn’t was completely ignored. The gorilla-man’s eyes focused on Geoff.

“Oh that’s not gonna work.” Geoff said, and kicked at where he thought Lindsay’s ankle might be. “Please turn me invisible again.”

He kicked her probably a bit too hard, and there was a moment of static before Lindsay appeared in front of him.

“Ow, fuck yourself.” Lindsay said to Geoff.

The gorilla-man charged.

Lindsay and Geoff sprinted away as fast as their legs could take them.

“Left! Left!” Geoff shouted, and they dashed down some stairs and into a lab on the left.

“We’re screwed, we’re so screwed,” Lindsay said. She bumped into a desk. “Jesus, my hip.”

“Now would be great if you could do the invisible thing again,” Geoff said between breaths.

Lindsay threw a door open and they ran into a second lab. Behind them, a cacophony of crashing and electronic smashing.

In front of them, a wall of heat and smoke.

They had to keep running.

“Sometimes it takes me a little while to work it out.” Lindsay replied. “Here, slow down for a sec, I gotta grab something from the backpack.”

Geoff slowed down just a fraction, enough for the backpack to stop moving around so much. He heard zippers and Lindsay muttering to herself as they weaved around chairs and tables. The worst kind of cyan light occasionally spotted a table but they ran past without a second thought to them.

Lindsay zipped the bag up.

“This’ll distract him, right?”

It was a concussion grenade.

“I didn’t bring that,” Geoff said, “Where the hell did you get-“

“-Answer the damn question before we die, please.”

“If it explodes right in his face, yeah.”

“That’s what we’ll do, then.” Lindsay paused to cough away some smoke. “Hit him with this- shit!”

Lindsay pulled Geoff out of the way just as a chair screamed past his head. The gorilla-man was upon them.

Lindsay released the fuse, waited about two and a half seconds, then tossed it.

Geoff didn’t see it impact because he was preoccupied with throwing himself behind a desk. The explosion was loud, and bright, and the gorilla-man _roared_.

Geoff felt more than heard the gorilla-man crash into a far wall. At the same time, Lindsay grabbed onto his shoulder and rested her head on her hand.

They sat there, still as statues, for about twenty seconds while the gorilla-man thrashed about. The blast probably threw off his balance as well as his sight and hearing. Only once did he crash into the desk they were hiding behind, and they jolted forward.

Finally, they disappeared.

It was not too difficult, after that, to sneak out of the labs and make their way back to the entrance.

They jogged up the stairs into a world of light and colour.

One more glass door, already ajar from other evacuating people, and they were outside and amongst the smoke and the noise and Lindsay’s hand slipped away and they were visible again.

“We did it.” Geoff breathed.

Because it turned out there was one other way to escape The Inconvenience, and she was looking at him with faded pink and blonde hair, a wild look in her eyes, and a gun in her hand.

“Of course we did.” Lindsay replied, eyes shining. “Now I’m gonna steal a car, you can direct me to a safehouse, and we’ll see about getting that thing off you, okay? The people around here are giving you weird looks.”

“Yep, sounds good to me.” Geoff heaved a deep breath. His lungs filled with car exhaust, rubbish from a nearby bin, and cigarette smoke. It tasted good. “And we’ve got a hell of a lot of things to talk about on the way.”


	7. Type 2A - Coupling Limit 2

Lindsay was not the best driver.

“So.” Lindsay said, pushing open the front door of Geoff’s apartment. It was made of heavy oak, and had a complex locking mechanism inside. She wasn’t prepared for the weight, so it took her a few seconds to gather enough force to move it. “My boys are not dead. They’re in another dimension.”

“Yep.” Geoff kicked over a pile of mail sat next to the door. The dates towards the bottom of the pile were five months earlier than the ones on top.

“And you’re from another dimension too. But not the same one.”

“Nope.”

“Because there’s an infinite number of dimensions. And I happen to exist in the one where you pass through.”

“Yep.”

“Okay, cool. I think we’re both on the same page now.”

Lindsay stepped to the side and allowed Geoff to enter the apartment. He wasn’t surprised it was still here- the building’s owner would’ve been stupid to rent it out or something until he had proof that the Gents weren’t coming back. There was a smell in the air, a sort of musty, dusty smell mixed with old food that made Geoff wrinkle his nose. Didn’t smell much like home.

Home was sweat, and clutter, and laughter. Cleaning up after the Lads. Helping Jack take care of his greenery. Controllers and game disks scattered about. Steam from takeaway blocking the view to the TV. The cleanliness of this apartment that only contained Gents was now foreign to him.

“We’re probably a long was off same page still. But we’re definitely in the same book.”

Geoff managed to tell Lindsay most of the important details in the car ride over, in between expletives. Lindsay liked to drive fast and without restraint.

Lindsay was pretty sure her apartment would've been sold by now, but after they were done here she was going to check if her cats were still alive and kicking around there. There was a good chance someone would’ve taken them in, Lindsay sounded quite optimistic.

In fact, Lindsay was taking all this new information and her situation in her stride, whereas Geoff was quickly feeling the effects of the last hour or so kicking in as the adrenaline rush wore off. His arms were stiff, his feet burned, and his eyes stung from the smoke Lindsay caused under Arcadius.

But Geoff could handle all that. Lindsay was alive, she was here and she wasn’t dead, and she’d helped him and taken care of the Inconvenience and stole some alien technology- Lindsay was alive.

When had the Inconvenience killed Lindsay in his own timeline? It would have been right after Michael made his escape attempt. That suggested Michael hadn’t done so in this universe. Geoff could vaguely recall seeing some bolts in Alt-Geoff’s cell. So that was why this universe was different to his own.

Lindsay told him in the car that she was outside her cell when Geoff appeared in his, and was able to take out her guard. She snuck into a lab and browbeat a scientist into giving her information, not just about the tech in the room but the Lads and Gent’s situation. From there, she’d found him.

Geoff directed Lindsay to Jack’s spare room where he knew there was usually a pair of fabric scissors lying about. If they weren't there, then Ryan’s room. He would help her look, but he still couldn’t use his damn arms. Geoff was getting real fucking tired of using his feet for everything and needing Lindsay’s assistance. The sooner he could get out of the jacket, and this universe while he’s at it, the better.

Geoff took up a position leaning against his dining room table and waited for Lindsay. He hated being here, not just in an apartment he didn’t feel comfortable in anymore, but the whole universe. The Inconvenience had tainted it somehow, and it didn’t help much as much as he’d thought to think about his death.

The first Inconvenience to torture him was still alive and out there, most likely. That managed to be a worse thought.

Better to think about Lindsay’s coming questions, questions he’d spent the last few weeks answering. He could do that in his sleep.

“You and Michael lied to me.” Lindsay said, arriving with the scissors.

Geoff blinked a couple of times.

“Uh-“

-“It’s not a time loop.”

Geoff clicked his tongue. “I thought we went over this.”

“Not in the car. Before Arcadius, at my house. You and Michael both led me to believe there was a time loop involved.”

“Uhhhhh… well it is,” Geoff argued, trying to defend his alternate self in a conversation he didn’t remember having what would’ve been years ago at this point. “just not a classic one. Your Lads and my Gents always go to back to the same point in time. Just not in space. But telling the Lindsays it’s a time loop worked well for a quick explanation.”

“The Lindsays, huh.” Lindsay pursed her lips at that. “How did you figure it out? That you were changing universes, I mean.”

Geoff scrunched his face up. “How did we… oh yeah, Gus told us.”

“Gus?”

“A very old friend of mine. Speaking of, he’ll have some great advice for you about that invisibility suit you’re wearing. He knows a thing or two about alien technology. I’ll give you his address and the secret knock and he’ll be happy to help you out.”

“You’re being real generous with what I assume are crew secrets, Geoff.” Lindsay said.

Geoff shrugged.

“I keep forgetting you’re not the Lindsay I’ve known for years.”

Lindsay got to work with the scissors, freeing Geoff from the jacket. “She a lot like me?”

“Almost identical. Would it go to your head if I told you she’s my boss now?”

Geoff could feel Lindsay laughing behind him, the cold edge of the scissor blade jumping against his neck. She halted her progress through the collar to avoid cutting him.

“I bet that’s the only way you and my Lads have kept the peace so long. God, years working together. I thought this was just going to be a one-time sorta deal, where the Gents and Lads would go back to being enemies at the end of it. And now, uh.”

The shaking behind him turned into something else.

“They left me here.” Lindsay said quietly.

“Lindsay-“

-“they knew, and they left me anyway.”

Geoff huffed out a breath through his nose, and slumped his shoulders. There was a pregnant pause while Geoff tried to think of something reassuring to say. Something that would help her through the crisis he now knew was slowly falling over Lindsay’s head.

“No, Lindsay, it wasn’t like that. They didn’t know, not at the start. They didn’t get a choice. You have to understand that they were in a shitty, life or death situation and while it was unfair of them to do that to you, they did the best they could.”

“How many universes did it take?” Lindsay asked.

“For my Lands and Gents to get out? We don’t know for sure, but it was probably around twelve hundred.”

“Twelve hundred…” Lindsay trailed off. “That many Lindsays. They would have passed through… oh. Then the last time I saw my Lads, the real ones, would’ve been when I said goodbye to them before they left for Zancudo.”

Geoff stared solidly out the window in front of him. It was the middle of the day, and a few helicopters traced a path towards an unseen destination. A news helicopter, and two police. They were far enough away Geoff couldn’t hear their blades. It was a fair guess to assume they were headed towards Arcadius, or, what was left of it. Geoff focused on the weight of Lindsay’s hand on his shoulder.

“I’m so sorry, but the Lads you knew are long gone. But here’s the thing. The Lads you saw that afternoon, that you’ve spent the last however many weeks locked up with, did you ever think they weren’t the ones you knew?”

“No, I didn’t think-“

-“Because they _were_ the same, in every way that mattered. You’re allowed to mourn them of course, God knows it took me a few weeks to adjust after we got out. Grieving for people I wouldn’t see again, and then say hi to the very next day. They’re gone from here, yeah, but they’re not dead. Not really.”

“What now?”

“They’ll get out of the loop. They’ll join together with the Gents to form a new crew called the Fakes, and you’ll run it. Keep them from doing anything too stupid, mostly by doing something even stupider.”

“That’s great for them,” Lindsay said, “But what should _I_ do?”

Geoff shook his head a little. “I don’t know. Whatever you want, I suppose. Start again. I know the original Lindsay burned Zancudo to the ground. Ray said it looked like she had a new look, maybe a new crew. You can do the same.”

He felt Lindsay take a deep breath behind him.

“Doesn’t sound like I’m like the Lindsay you knew at all.” Lindsay sniffed. “Because that’s not gonna cut it. Original Lindsay my ass.”

Lindsay spun Geoff around until they were facing each other. There were tears still tracing paths down her cheeks but there was a hard set to her watery eyes.

“You’ve done this all before. You’ve got all the answers. So tell me. How do I get them back? _My_ Lads, not some copies from another universe. How do I bring my Lads back here?”

Geoff pursed his lips and shook his head again. “I don’t have nearly as many answers as you think.”

“Then what was your plan to get back to your universe? I can go to them.”

“I need an alien helmet to control the device on my arm,” Geoff explained, “but if the Corpirate had his in Arcadius, it’s probably gone up in flames by now.”

“But you said some dickhead across the ocean had the same tech? Why don’t I go steal his, and one of those cube things on your arm?”

“Lindsay, no.” Geoff said. “Prince James has heaps more working tech than the Corpirate, and people trained to use it. That includes another invisibility suit like you’re wearing. You go to him and you die, do you understand?”

Lindsay looked unfazed. “What if you help me?”

But Geoff was already shaking his head in earnest. “Absolutely not. I wouldn’t be much help, and I’m not giving James the opportunity to lock me up over there. I’m sick of being tied down and studied. Or he’d kill me.” Geoff paused for a long moment, considering. “But you’re forgetting something else.”

“What?”

“Your original Lads? When they get out of their loop, they’ll have another Lindsay there with them. One who acted as a distraction for the Corpirate and helped them. And while they’ll mourn you, just as my Lads mourned their original Lindsay, they’ll accept the new Lindsay as just Lindsay. Because she’s the same in the most important way.”

“And what’s that.”

Geoff cracked a sad smile. “She loves them just the same. And that wouldn’t be fair to her, to shove another Lindsay into that mix.”

Lindsay’s face fell. She turned Geoff back around and made the final few cuts to free him. Geoff let her work in silence.

The jacket fell away. Geoff shook his arms out, getting some blood flowing again. A visible weight lifted from his shoulders when he checked over the hypercube on his arm, brightly glowing. His fingers twitched, desperate to leave this terrible universe, but he’d made a promise first.

Geoff pulled a pen and paper from his backpack and wrote down Gus’s details. He slid it across the table towards Lindsay but stopped short. He’d had an idea.

“I have an idea.”

Lindsay looked up at Geoff. He met her eyes evenly.

“Come with me.”

“With you?”

“Yeah,” Geoff nodded, “I can bring stuff with me across universes. My backpack. Food, living things. I bet I can take you with me. Please, Lindsay. Let me try.” As the idea formed in his mind, he couldn’t stop his words growing more frantic and pleading.

This was a game changer. If he had someone with him, who he could talk to and not have to leave behind? Who was reliable and thought quickly, outside the box. If he could have anyone travel with him who wasn’t his boyfriend, it would be Lindsay.

Lindsay started towards him, then pulled back.

“No, Geoff. I can’t.”

“Lindsay listen-“ Geoff went for her wrist but Lindsay jerked her hand back and he aborted the movement.

“I said _no_.”

“Why not? If you don’t want to stay here, you can help me. And once I get a helmet-“

-“You can finally control where you’re going.” Lindsay cut him off. “But you’ve spent God knows how long jumping from universe to universe, and you haven’t found one yet. At least, not one you’re willing to risk your life for. There’s one _right here_ , just across the ocean, and you’re not going to go for it?”

“I would _die_ , Lindsay. Prince James or even the Corpirate aren’t people you go up against alone. Not even the Lads and Gents together could do that on the first try. And we only get the one.”

“But you have experience,” Lindsay argued. “We could take the time to plan something out. We’ve got the invisibility suit, Gus, your connections in this city. I don’t understand it at all.”

“I have enough experience to know whatever plan we come up with isn’t going to be enough. Just listen for a second. The universes I’m passing through all seem to relate to different points in my history. There’s a point in time where my crew _has_ a helmet. All I need to do is travel until I come across a universe that’s still got that point the same. It’s that simple.”

Lindsay twisted the scissors in her hand for a long second, the tip digging into her finger.

“And if you never come across one with the same point? It sounds just as risky to me. I’m not doing it, Geoff.”

It felt like all the energy sapped out of his legs and Geoff had to hold onto the table for support. To have that hope and lose it just as quickly took all the strength out of him.

“Lindsay, please, I can’t keep doing this by myself. I just can’t.”

Lindsay nodded to herself, then straightened up, ignoring Geoff’s pleading. There was a cool certainty to her movements.

“Leave if you have to, I can’t make you stay here and help me. I’m going to steal the tech that Prince has and find a universe where some Lads are in need of a Lindsay. And if they love me just the same- I can be okay with that. More than okay, I think. It’s a nice thought, now that I think about it.”

Lindsay slowly reached out for Geoff’s right hand, giving him time to pull away if he wanted. He didn’t. She picked it up and placed it over the device, where it rocked gently before settling back into place.

She spoke again.

“That’s what you said to me.” She frowned. “Why can’t you follow your own advice?”

Geoff sucked in a deep breath.

“My original Lads and Gents don’t get another Geoff. They’re missing me. It’s just me wandering around out here, away from where I’m supposed to be.”

“How would you know?”

Geoff remembered the vision Jeremy’s device had shown him, of the line of Geoffs making the same decisions he had, and his blood ran cold.

“I just- I have a feeling.”

Lindsay did not respond to that.

Geoff shifted his weight to his other foot, antsy to leave this universe.

“If you won’t come with me, I’ll say goodbye. And good luck. There are spare keys to all our cars in the carpark in the top shelf of the kitchen.”

Lindsay inclined her head. “Thank you. And back at you.”

Geoff disappeared into an infinite tangle of strings.

 

* * *

 

He was in a garbage dump.

Geoff sank to his knees, and knelt in a carpet of filth. His corpse stared back him from its slightly buried position in the rubbish heap. Around him, the corpses of his Fakes. Further out, more rubbish, and old car parts and smelly food and torn apart stuffed animals, bags and bags of it, enough to fill the dump to its limits. Nowadays the city preferred to export its waste, but occasionally people would sneak stuff in. Geoff could pick out locations where he’d dumped bodies here as well, years ago. He supposed it was ironic, in a way he couldn’t be bothered to think about too much right now.

He must’ve dislodged something when he moved because the pile next to him shifted, and Gavin’s hand slopped over and traced a rotten path down his shoulder. Geoff shrieked and twisted away, and that seemed to shred away the last of his calm and he quickly worked his way out of the tip like something was chasing him.

Dirty, disgusting place. Geoff cleaned a bit of filth out from under his fingernails. Some of it was probably his own dead body. The impact of the thought didn’t quite reach him. Too much of him was still trying to process.

He stole a parked car and sped towards the city, more recklessly than he would have under normal circumstances. There was a little you could get away with in the city, things the cops would overlook while they went after bigger fish. Minor traffic infringements, disorderly conduct, hell, if they were particularly busy it wasn’t uncommon to see people solving problems themselves with fists in the street, holding up traffic. But Geoff raced back to his apartment without a single thought to the cops or his wellbeing.

He knew the apartment would be empty. He knew there’d be a layer of dust, the smell of off food in the fridge, Jack’s plants on the roof long dead. But he thought there might be a chance Lindsay was there still, where he left her, and he’d get her to reconsider and they’d get through the rest of the universes together. He had another argument lined up and it wouldn’t matter if there wasn’t another universe with the same point-

She wasn’t there.

It still gutted him, even if he knew it was irrational.

But the whole goddamn thing was irrational from the beginning, from when he accidentally touched Jeremy’s device to now. He was supposed to be somewhere else doing one fucking thing and then go home, that was the plan. Shoot the spaceship out of the sky and that’d be the end of it. Why was he here? How many more universes of bullshit was he going to have to endure?

Why did he have to do them all by himself?

Every other task the alien technology threw at him, he at least had his crew with him. Zancudo. The Corpirate. Jeremy. He didn’t think it was possible to miss them this much, how physical it would feel in his chest. He needed them and he couldn’t do this by himself. He wasn’t enough. There was so much he didn’t know. There was no possible way he was expected to figure everything out on his lonesome.

It wasn’t fair.

Geoff could explore all the way to the far corners of the multiverse but he couldn’t go back to the only one that mattered. These other universes were awful. What was the point of going forward when it was only going to be worse? Shouldn’t there be universes out there where he’s happy with his crew, and everything worked out fine for them? If that wasn’t the case, surely it was only a matter of time before one of these universes was set up to kill him.

And if it was the case, why didn’t he get to pass through them?

One of the last things Lindsay said to him was also weighing on his mind. It was funny, how one sentence could get stuck in your head. There was a chance his Fakes didn’t even know he was gone, and some other Geoff had taken his place. One that shot down the alien spaceship as expected and got to go home to _his_ Fakes.

The idea brought a hot flush of fury, of jealousy through his system and he was suddenly a lot more sympathetic to what Lindsay must’ve gone through. But he calmed down further when he thought it through. At least his Fakes would be happy. That was the main thing.

Ignorance is bliss.

Geoff put his bag down on the dining room table and approached an adjacent cabinet. It was filled with bottles, and he hadn’t opened it in over two years. But he pulled open one of the cabinet’s doors and leaned over to peer at the contents.

He stayed like that for a very long time.

Slowly, he shut the cabinet door, hands still empty.

He showered. Ate something non-perishable from the pantry. It was akin to eating ashes.

He entered his bedroom.

There was one of Jack’s jackets on the bed, where Jack had decided to forgo it just before the Zancudo heist. It still smelled like his floral cologne, had some of his hair on it. There was a pair of Ryan’s pants hanging over the back of a chair, because Jack promised to lengthen the pockets and he had more experience doing it and a steadier hand. Even the Lads made an appearance, on a printout from a security camera, a blurry photo of the three of them leaving a movie theatre. The only thing missing was something that reminded him of Jeremy.

Geoff felt an immense urge to run, to go find them, now, now, now, but he didn’t know where to go so it just felt like he was getting torn apart.

Now would be a good time to finally break down, take some time to decompress. He could feel the emotion build up in the back of his throat, like some mass made of sandpaper was trying to claw its way out of him.

It felt like there was an invisible force holding him back. He’d like to cry but he just… couldn’t. He stared at the clock on his bedside table, eyes forced open until they watered, but even that wasn’t enough to encourage tears to fall. There was nothing for it but forcing the feelings down, away for him to manage later, and the warmth of the bed did nothing to stop the icy coolness wrapping around him like a blanket.


	8. Type 2B - S Duality 1

The universe reassembled around Geoff like the weaving of a quilt and all Geoff saw was blackness.

He was lying on something squishy and bony that gave away when he shifted a little. The smell was horrendous. Geoff rolled off whatever he was lying and came to an abrupt halt when his shoulder hit a hard surface, stopping his movement.

He probed it with a hand. It felt like wood covered in fabric. Pushing at it produced no results. Geoff pushed harder, then followed the ceiling around until it abruptly changed direction, coming down next to him only a few inches away. The same was true on the other side.

An absurd thought dangled in front of him that he wasn’t prepared to entertain.

He wasn’t-

His hand came up above him and then behind his head.

His hand met wiry hair and wet, mushy flesh. One finger scraped against what had to be bone, and caught in an eye socket. He jerked his hand away and at the same time banged his knee against the lid of what he was now sure was a coffin.

“Fuck. Shit. _Fuck_.”

He punched the ceiling above him as hard as he could. The wood cracked ominously and Geoff cursed again.

“Fucking- idiot! God!”

Buried alive.

How much oxygen did he have? Was the ceiling going to cave in on him now?

“I’m so fucking stupid.”

He needed to think.

He should have a few hours of oxygen in here, at least. Enough to wait out the recharge time of the hypercube. It was what, almost three hours? Surely there was enough oxygen if he stopped moving about and controlled his breathing. Surely.

The air around him was already heating up, and it was thick with moisture. Air was more than just oxygen. Whenever he breathed out, he would add more carbon dioxide to the mix. How long could he breathe that? Or was carbon dioxide heavier than air or something, would it move to one part of the coffin?

What about his own decomposing corpse he was swimming in? It must be filling the air with toxic shit, based on how it smelled. That couldn’t be good for him to breathe. Or maybe if he moved about more, he could push it away from his mouth somehow. Or pull his shirt over his face.

How the hell do gasses work?

Wait. Geoff was an idiot. He had a phone in his pocket. He could call his crew.

If the Geoff of this universe was buried in a coffin as opposed to dumped in a ditch somewhere, that probably meant one of the Fakes had given him a funeral. He’d call them.

He fished the phone from his pocket but he couldn’t bring it up to his face. The angle his backpack left him at made the space too narrow. He left it to his right and winced when the bright light blinded him.

No reception. Of course.

But there was a chance he could still call emergency services. He made the call with his thumb and while it tried to connect, he wondered if it was normal to consider emergency services second in a situation like this.

“This is Los Santos State Emergency Services. Please state your-“

Oh thank God. Geoff almost dropped the phone in his relief.

“I’m in a coffin, I don’t know where I am,” Geoff said as slowly and clearly as he could manage. “I’ve been buried and I can’t get out.”

“Sir, the most important thing you can do is stay calm,” the lady on the phone said. “I need you to be still and try to conserve your air, do you understand?”

“I do, yeah.”

“Okay, I need you to hold tight while we see if we can trace your phone. Just stay still and quiet for me, can you do that sir?”

“Yep, got it.”

Seconds ticked by. Sweat began to bead on Geoff’s forehead as the coffin heated up. The fabric and the clothes absorbed some of the moisture in the space but only served to trap the heat. He wanted to wipe the water away but he knew it was more important to stay still. Use up as little oxygen as possible.

More time passed, minutes. Geoff recalled Gavin set up and gave him the phone. Would emergency services be able to track it? Geoff didn’t know how all that worked. Something about pinging cell towers, maybe, but he really didn’t have a clue.

If he couldn’t be found, he’d die here either from lack of oxygen or from trying to crawl his way out.

It was for the best that Lindsay didn’t come with him, Geoff realised. Three people wouldn’t have fit inside the cramped space anyway. What if they broke through the coffin’s ceiling? It was hard enough with just him and… himself.

“Jesus Christ,” Geoff said, “I know exactly where I am. I’m in Geoff Ramsey’s grave. Hey, lady? You need to look up where Geoffrey Ramsey was buried. That’s where I am.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I’m lying on him. I can uh, recognise him.”

“Okay, we’re making the calls now. Please hold tight.”

During the wait, she took his details down. Geoff gave her a fake name but kept the rest of information accurate. She told him he’d have at least two hours of air, give or take, as long as he didn’t move or talk more than he needed to. Then the line was silent again.

Geoff waited as patiently as he could, every few minutes or so fighting back the urge to ask the lady on the phone how everything was progressing. He was going to be fine. He just needed to be more patient.

“Sir? We can’t find a record of someone with that name residing in any of the cemeteries in Los Santos.”

Fuck. Of course if a Fake buried him, they might’ve kept it off the books.

He still had options. Even if he couldn’t call his crew, emergency services could. They could ask where he was buried. The trick would be getting them to take the call seriously and actually give the right information up. It wasn’t likely they were going to believe he’d risen from the dead. More likely they’d believe it was a trick from another crew. That’s what Geoff would think, if he were on the other side of this situation.

“That’s fine, that’s fine,” Geoff told her. He flicked through his contact list. “He might be buried under a nickname or somewhere private. Write these names and numbers down.” He listed off first the Gent’s, and then the Lad’s phone numbers. He didn’t know who else was still alive, so it wouldn’t hurt to give the lot. If they all had to get new numbers after this, too bad. He wasn’t going to die over it. “And if they think it’s a prank call or something, don’t give them my name. It won’t help. Tell them I uh, know Ryan the Gnome. They’ll know what it means.”

“Calling down the list now.” The lady said with no hesitation.

His phone told him he’d been buried for half an hour. He was swimming in sweat, but at least he’d gotten used to the smell. The hypercube had begun to glow softly again, providing some comforting light. Geoff kept his breathing shallow and even.

Eight minutes later, the lady spoke again.

“We’ve got a location from a Mr Free. He said you’d be in a grave marked Geoff Fink in Vinewood Cemetery.”

“Yes! Yes, that’d be it.”

“We’re sending a rescue team to Vinewood Cemetery immediately. They’re about fifteen minutes away.”

“Thank God.”

The next twenty minutes were amongst the worst of his life. 

But at the end of them, the sound of heavy machinery.

“I can hear that!” Geoff shouted at his phone.

“That should be the excavator. It should only be another twenty minutes. Please keep still and quiet, and you’ll be out in no time.”

The beeping and creaking of the excavator slowly grew more audible. The coffin ceiling rattled, and Geoff braced his arms against it. The vibrations through the wood were getting stronger as minutes passed.

“They’re getting close,” Geoff said.

There was a scraping noise only a few inches above his head. Voices, shouting. Softer scraping.

Geoff pushed against the lid at the same time that it lifted away.

Bright, bright light and a warm hand, grasping his own.

Someone pulled him free and Geoff was led out of the dirt, and onto wet, muddy grass.

It smelled wonderful.

“Jesus Christ.” Geoff said to no one in particular. The cemetery was crawling with people- there were first responders and ambulances, and the gravedigger standing by with his excavator. There was also a fire truck and a group of firemen with shovels. A loud cheer went up as Geoff emerged, and several hands touched him all over- pulling him away from the grave and towards safety. It was a bit much after the hour of dark and stillness, with the only sounds to keep him company his breathing and the blood in his ears.

A medic approached him and began the process of checking him for injuries and shock. Geoff went along with it until they started pulling him towards an ambulance, but something else had caught Geoff’s eye.

A beat up purple motorbike pulled up outside the cemetery’s front fence. A lone rider rested his helmet on the seat and looked towards Geoff with a pair of highly reflective sunglasses.

Gavin took his sunglasses off and even at such a distance Geoff could make out the tears in his eyes.

“Gavin?” Geoff called out, and maneuvered away from the medic, as well as the small crowd of people waiting to hear if he was okay. Once Geoff had elbowed a few people out of the way the crowd figured out what was going on and parted.

“…Geoff?”

“Gavin?” Geoff called out back. A broad grin broke out across his face.

Gavin came to a sudden stop. Geoff stopped too, so they were standing a few feet away. Gavin looked like he wanted to step closer but he didn’t, his hands rising to feel the collar of his shirt and twist the fabric.

“You’re not a zombie, are you?” Gavin said, a bit of incredulity in his voice.

Geoff shook his head. “Not a zombie. But I’m not-”

Gavin crushed him with a hug. His hands couldn’t quite go all the way around Geoff, with the backpack in the way, but he held his arms tight and pressed his face into the crook of Geoff’s neck.

Geoff froze for a half second before sinking into the hug, his head coming to rest on top of Gavin’s.

There was quite a bit of noise from the crowd Geoff left behind, so after a few seconds Geoff gently eased Gavin off him.

“We need to talk. Can you take us back to the penthouse-”

Gavin pressed his face against Geoff’s and kissed him like it was the last thing he’d ever do.

Gavin tasted like home, like sweat and fast food and a little bit of motor oil. He also, strangely enough, smelled like flowers.

“Are you wearing Jack’s cologne?” Geoff asked as he forced himself to move away.

Gavin shuddered, halfway between a laugh and falling apart.

“Yeah,” Gavin said, sniffing. “Yeah I am. Reminds me of him.”

“He’s not-”

Gavin shook his head. “Just me left. Or it was. Are the others coming back with you?”

Geoff bit down on his tongue hard enough to hurt.

“Just me. But can we go to the penthouse and talk?”

Gavin squeezed his hand. “Whatever you want, love.”

It felt like years since Geoff had last been called that. It was difficult to remind himself he needed to keep a bit of distance- he wouldn’t be here long. Gavin needed to understand that, and the sooner he did the better.

“Listen, don’t-” Geoff didn’t know how to finish that sentence. “There’s a lot you don’t understand about why I’m here.”

“I don’t care,” Gavin said with confidence. “Whatever the cost, whatever the reason you’re here. I don’t care. I’ll pay that price.”

Geoff flinched. “If you’re sure.”

“I am.”

Gavin cast a glance at the approaching crowd of emergency responders.

“We shouldn’t go to the penthouse, but I’ve something almost as nice Downtown.” Gavin’s shoulder slid against Geoff’s. “Think we can outrun that lot?”

The fallout from calling emergency services was a headache Geoff refused to deal with. Plus, Geoff sure as shit didn’t have the funds to pay for it all.

“Don’t have much of a choice, do we?”

* * *

“You’re not-” Gavin swallowed heavily. “You won’t stay?”

Geoff’s heart broke a little. He sunk a little lower into Gavin’s couch.

“You wouldn’t ask me to leave my own Fakes behind, Gav. I couldn’t do that to them.”

“But, but…” Gavin trailed off.

Geoff had showered, repacked his bag, and explained everything he could to Gavin. The hypercube shone with a full glow, the superglue still holding steady. The only thing stopping him from leaving was a sad pair of hazel eyes.

“Can I come with you, then?” Gavin pleaded. “I’ve got all the same skills your Gavin had-”

“-Has.”

“Has, so I can help you!”

“That’s not the issue.” Geoff snapped at him, a little harder than he intended to. He willed his posture to relax.  “I don’t care if you’ve never seen a computer in your life. It’s not safe for either of us.”

“It’d be better than here.” Gavin muttered.

“You say that until there’s three bodies squished into the one grave and we’re running out of oxygen.” Geoff said.

“Isn’t it worth the risk?”

“Not to me!” Geoff replied. “Is there really nothing going for you in this universe that you’d risk killing us both?”

“I don’t know if I mentioned it, but our crew’s dead.” Gavin said, with a bit of heat before continuing more sedately. “Funhaus is the biggest crew in the city now.”

“Could you get a job with them?”

“Maybe,” Gavin admitted, “But I could use some help getting in contact with them.”

Gavin brightened.

“Could you stay until I do? Please, you owe me. I saved your life.”

Well, it was fair.

“Fine,” Geoff agreed after a lengthy pause, shutting his eyes and rubbing the bridge of his nose with his finger and thumb. “But only until we resolve this. A day at the most.”

Gavin lit up like a sunrise. A little of the infectious energy made its way over to Geoff’s side of the couch, and his expression softened.

It’d been a while since he’d seen Gavin, or any of his crew, look so unabashedly happy.

“You could use a break as well, couldn’t you?” Gavin asked. “I mean, you’ve been jumping around universes for weeks now. Spend the day with me.”

“I shouldn’t-”

-“For me? Come on,” Gavin’s grin was much cheekier than it was a moment before. “you owe me, remember? When was the last time you went down to the pier? They opened up a new ice creamery a few weeks ago.”

Geoff started to argue, but stopped himself. What harm would it do? He could afford a day to rest and be around someone he thoroughly missed. The contact would probably do them both some good.  And besides, it would be criminal to crush Gavin again so soon after telling him Geoff was leaving.

And Geoff was a criminal, of course. One of the best in Los Santos. But right now, that was the last thing he wanted.

“Fine.” Geoff said again, trying not to let the sweetness he was feeling convey across. “We’ll make a date of it tomorrow. I need the rest of today to sleep and eat something that hasn’t been sitting in a pantry for five months.”

And if Gavin was lit up before, that was nothing compared to now.

  


* * *

  


Most people liked Del Perro Pier in the evening, when the sky was pink with sunset and the lights from the rides really shone against the water. The buildings were silhouettes and the owner of the burger bar turned on the fairy lights she’d strung around the railings. There’d be open ocean ahead of you and the beauty of the city behind, if you were into that sort of thing. But that was also when it was the busiest, and Geoff had never been a fan of tourists.

It was convenient, then, that Gavin knew it too and they headed down there just before midday. Gavin knew of a hole-in-the-wall that made brunch and they visited there first, slowly warming up to each other.

“I’ve been on my own for eight months now,” Gavin told him in between bites of bruschetta, “kept the penthouse for about six months, but now I rent it out.”

Geoff swirled his fancy imported ginger beer with a straw, rattling the ice cubes. It was all right. “Have you spoken to anyone else since then? Burnie, Lindsay-”

Gavin frowned into his tomatoes. “They’re dead as well.”

Geoff took his hand away from his glass. “Do you mind if I ask what happened to everyone? I assume a rival crew was involved, but it wouldn’t be Funhaus if you were open to working with them.”

Gavin waved his hand dismissively. “Some other crew we were having problems with for a while. Surprised us. Just a dumb mistake, a really dumb one.”

Geoff waited for more, but Gavin stared steadily at his meal.

Geoff leaned forward.

“There probably wasn’t anything you could’ve done, Gav.”

“No, it’s fine, I know,” Gavin replied. “And anyhow, I got my revenge. Gave all their info, names, addresses, proof of illicit activities, all to the FIB. They don’t exist any more.”

“That’s good.”

“That was when, uh,” Gavin looked a mite uncomfortable, “Funhaus contacted me. Offered me a job.”

“And you what, turned them down?”

Gavin nodded sheepishly.

“They came to the penthouse, but I was in no state to accept an offer like that at the time. That’s the main reason I moved out.”

“They didn’t give you a phone number or anything just in case you changed your mind?”

“Nope. I’ve done a little bit of digging since then, but haven’t come up with anything solid. They’re pretty good at covering their digital tracks.”

“At least finding them isn’t gonna be a problem.” Geoff polished off the last of his eggs. “Back in my universe I dealt with Funhaus regularly. I know where a few of their more popular safehouses are.”

“And what,” Gavin said, “I should just rock up and ask them for a job?”

“Why not?” Geoff shrugged and stacked his cutlery on his plate. “If they were impressed with you before, they’ll be extra impressed if you find their hideouts.”

“Or they’ll shoot me on sight.”

“Or they might not. They’re not like that.”

“But it’s a fifty-fifty chance they might.” Gavin flashed him a devilish grin.

“That’s not- I swear to God, Gavin.” Geoff darted his hand out, quick as a snake, and stole the last piece of Gavin’s bruschetta.

“Oi!”

“So the plan’ll be,” Geoff paused mid mouthful. “I don’t have one yet. Didn’t you say there was an ice cream place around here?”

“Yeah, a couple of blocks away. I’ll grab the bill.”

Gavin pulled a credit card out of his pocket and Geoff squinted at it.

“That’s not… is that _my_ credit card?”

Gavin smirked and spun it between his fingers. “Bruschetta’s a good distraction, love.”

  


* * *

  


They got ice cream from the new shop right on the edge of the pier.

“I could always do the thing Ryan did,” Geoff said, “stand behind you and look menacing.”

Gavin laughed. “I don’t think you’ve ever looked menacing a single day in your entire life.”

“I can do menacing!”

“You can do a mean tired, or grumpy, but that’s why you worked with people like Ryan. Fearsome sometimes, yeah of course, but it’d always been hard for me to think of you as intimidating since I literally ran into you at the bank.”

“Were you enemies with the Gents from the get go?”

“Nah, the bank collapsed on us. Fast friends, and then some. That wasn’t the case for you?”

“It took us a little longer to get there, but we did.” Geoff said simply.

They walked down the length of the pier, passing a few other people sightseeing but not many. It wasn’t quite lunch time and the place was mostly quiet, with the only sounds coming from the ocean. Occasionally Geoff saw a wave lap against a support post in between the slats, but the spray was never enough to come up through them.

“I didn’t keep it.” Gavin said unprompted.

“Didn’t keep what?”

“His mask, Ryan’s. I buried it with him. Kind of regretting it now.” Gavin admitted.

“Where did you bury him?”

Gavin’s head whipped around to face Geoff’s.

“We are _not_ digging him up for it, Geoff!”

Geoff couldn’t help the small snort of laughter that escaped him.

“That wasn’t what I was gonna say! I was just curious.”

“He was next to you. Jack on your other side, Michael and Jeremy next to him.”

A cloud raced past overhead, briefly darkening the pier.

“I’m sorry if I’m coming across so callous about them.” Geoff said. “It’s not that I don’t care, I’m just… expecting it, most universes. I’m ready for it. Used to it, even.”

“If there’s really that many other universes out there,” Gavin said, “with us in them, there have to be a bunch of good ones out there.”

Geoff licked his hand where the ice cream dripped on it. “An infinite number of them, to be precise.”

Gavin’s arm bumped against his. “So if there’s good and bad universes out there, there’s a fifty-fifty chance of it being one or the other, innit.”

Geoff bumped him back, much harder. Gavin stumbled and laughed.

“I’m really thinking it isn’t up to chance at all, at this point.” Geoff said. “There has to be a point to all this. Some sort of logic or pattern to it. Maybe I’m heading to the universe I’m meant to be, and I just need to be more patient.”

“But that doesn’t feel right to you,” Gavin repeated what Geoff told him earlier.

“It doesn’t.”

“What about that thing that’s following you? Maybe that disrupted whatever you were meant to do.”

“Maybe it’s in control of this thing,” Geoff held out the hypercube, “and it’s leading me to some awful fate it has planned.”

“Not the brightest plan. It sounds like half the people in your other universes could’ve done that without too much trouble.”

“Ended me right then and there? Yeah.” Geoff licked his ice cream and spoke out towards the ocean, projecting his voice. “Kill me yourself, coward.”

Gavin scraped at the bottom of his container with the little wooden spoon. “I don’t care how you talk about them, really. Just that you do. It’s so nice to do it with someone who knew them well. I missed…” Gavin trailed off.

“The familiarity.” Geoff supplied. “The trust. Being around others who know you and you can relax completely around.”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

Geoff finished his cone. “Yeah. I miss them too. Oh!”

“What?”

“That reminded me. My Ryan pretty much stopped wearing his mask in the last few months I saw him. He switched it with some elaborate black and white face paint. If you want, I could teach you how to paint the design?”

Gavin grinned, and the only thing brighter was the sun’s reflections glittering on the waves. 

“There’s nothing I want more. We’ll pick some paint up on the way home.”

He took their rubbish and threw it in a bin, almost skipping as he went.

“How about, instead of pulling a Ryan, you pull a Ray?”

“How so?”

“You can snipe from afar and protect me if Funhaus does end up trying to shoot me.”

“I don’t have a sniper rifle, do you?”

“No, but I thought-”

-”You saw what I had on me when we left the graveyard and I wasn’t carrying a sniper rifle.”

“I don’t know! Maybe you can just point a laser pointer instead. _That,_ I’ve got. Have the same effect.”

“That’s ridiculous.” Geoff said.

“But do you think Funhaus would suspect it?”

“You know what, we’ll keep that idea as plan B.” Geoff said. “How about this. We sweeten the deal for them somehow. Who’s their biggest problem right now? It’s not Colmillo Blanco, is it?”

Gavin winced slightly. “Nope, definitely not them. I made sure of it.”

“Ah.”

“But you know,” Gavin said, “I don’t think I want to spend the only day I have with you worrying about Funhaus. Is there any reason why I can’t pop over tomorrow and do it all then?”

“I don’t... think so?”

“Then that’s Tomorrow Gavin’s problem.”

Something parked by the side of the pier caught Gavin's eye. It was a sleek, city-wheeled motorbike, pulled up close against another. The owners of the bikes, members of the local biker gang, were enjoying ice cream cones a fair distance along the beach, eyeing the jet skis.

“I have an idea,” Gavin told him, eyes glinting. He jerked his head towards the bikes. “A quick jaunt around the city. What do you say?”

“Why?” Geoff asked.

“Because I want to. When was the last time you did anything fun on this island?”

“Gavin, wait!”-

But Gavin was already gone, sauntering down the pier towards the bikes. He had the purple one hotwired before Geoff even made it over to him.

Gavin tossed a helmet to Geoff and he caught it deftly.

“What about the car?” Geoff asked, thinking of Michael's sports car waiting for them on a side road.

“It'll be there when we get back,” Gavin said. “Or it won't. I hear there's a lot of crime in the area recently. But I have six times the number of cars I'll ever need. Well, five times. Don't ever tell the Ryan in your universe what I did to his Zentorno. Catch me!”

Gavin roared the engine and tore off, a long skidmark detailing his escape. Geoff shouted a curse after him and took off a little slower and with a little more caution.

The bikers, now furious and sprinting towards them, were left behind in the dust and sand.

Gavin was already two blocks ahead of him, weaving in and out of traffic. Geoff accelerated slightly, trying to keep him in sight. 

“Gavin!” Geoff called out, knowing full well Gavin couldn't hear him.

Gavin swung wide out through an intersection and then took a sudden left turn, cutting across two lanes heading the other way. A truck screeched to a stop and blared his horn. Traffic paused for a brief moment and Geoff decelerated and took the corner a little more sedately. Gavin lost a little ground swerving around a group of jaywalkers and Geoff took the opportunity to catch up, speeding towards him recklessly.

Because oh. His suit jacket wasn't designed to keep out the cold or the wind, and it whipped at him something fierce, but there was a dirty grin plastered on his face. The speed, the thrill of the chase, the chance of death creeping ever higher with each bold manoeuvre, It all brought Geoff to the conclusion that caution was for other people.

Some of the drivers stuck in traffic were really laying into their horns now, a cacophony of annoyance as Geoff swerved past it all.

Gavin slowed down briefly to check how far away Geoff was, but he needn't have bothered. Geoff shot past him like the cops were on his tail, and if they didn't leave the congested city blocks soon that would definitely be the case. Geoff had broken more traffic laws in the last five minutes than he had in the previous month. There was the brief sound of Gavin's cry of shock but then the roar of the bike ate it up.

Geoff took his hand off the accelerator to point towards the Vinewood sign. There. Out of the city.

Geoff didn't spare the time to see if Gavin caught the gesture, he sped off down the next right turn that took him up into the suburbs. There was less traffic here but the roads were crowded with parked cars, and one threatened to pull out in front of you at any time. Once there was a particularly sharp turn and then Geoff caught sight of Gavin only a few seconds behind, flipping him off. Geoff returned the gesture.

They rode together, neck and neck, at a more leisurely pace through the quieter and hilly segments of Los Santos. Gavin pointed out a house at one point, seemingly at random, and it was a good few seconds before Geoff remembered it was where Ryan blew up Gavin's bike. It felt like a lifetime ago. There was still a soot stain on the balcony's ceiling.

It was surprising to Geoff, to see that had still happened in this universe where neither crew made it to Zancudo. Gavin told him the two crews arrived at the same time under the bridge to park their cars, and a scuffle had broken out. Attracting attention from Zancudo, they escaped together and fell into a friendship and later a relationship. As far as Gavin was aware, the device was still down there.

A gentle curve came up ahead that poked through the trees and gave a clear view of the city they'd left behind. Since Geoff’d set out without a clear destination in mind, this was a good a place as any to pull over and take a break.

They left their motorcycles by the side of the road. There was little traffic this high up- no fear of being disturbed. A metal guard rail protected the road from the steep slope down the hill to the trees and it was to this Geoff and Gavin headed towards.

The city. Geoff had travelled quite extensively when he was younger, before he met Jack and started the Gents. There wasn’t anywhere else like it, with the decadence and fast and loose rules running together hand in hand. The criminals were a different breed, the gangs a different species altogether. There was no other place he’d rather call home.

And yet… this city wasn’t it. There was Arcadius, he could make out against the glare. The skeleton of the Mile High Club skyscraper was taller than he’d ever seen it before, almost complete. The skyline was too different.

Even in his head, the description felt nit-picky. Geoff pushed the thought away.

“Gross,” Gavin said, pointing skywards. There was a mass of clouds sweeping in from the west, and they looked deep and dark enough to drench the city and the surrounding suburbs, including them.

“Do you think we can get home before it starts up?”

Gavin settled down on the guard rail, staring out over the city. He took his sunglasses off and tucked them in his front pocket. He smiled at Geoff.

“Just a little longer. Five minutes more.”

  


* * *

  


They didn’t, in fact, make it back before it started raining. They’d also stopped to buy face paint and that hadn’t helped, and they paid the price for it about three blocks away from Gavin’s apartment.

“My _hair_ ,” Gavin complained, rummaging through his linen closet for a fresh towel. Once he found one he draped it over his face and walked blind to his living room.

Geoff retrieved a towel of his own and wiped the water off his face. “You’re gonna trip and fall on something.”

“Will not,” Gavin argued, “I know my way around here like the back of my- _ah!_ ”

Gavin shrieked, jumping away from the tube of paint that had just hit his neck. Geoff laughed and palmed a second tube.

“Watch out dude, you’d better be careful.” Geoff said with a smirk.

“Oh, sod off.” Gavin sat down on his couch and dried himself off. He picked up the dropped tube of facepaint and threw it back to Geoff.

“Right. Teaching time.” Gavin said. “And if you paint a knob on my face without me knowing I’ll… be annoyed about it.”

“Noted.”

Geoff settled in next to him. They’d picked up a cheap paintbrush at the shop as well and Geoff coated it in white paint.

“This is gonna be cold.”

“I’ve worn face paint before, you mong.”

Geoff put a glob of white right between Gavin’s eyes. “Better stop talking, we wouldn’t want to mess the lines up.”

“Well you’d better start talking, because I don’t know what you’re painting.”

“It’s a skull,” Geoff said. Gavin snorted. “Yeah, I know. It’s not _much_ improvement over the mask, but it’s something.”

“It’s gotta be better than what my Ryan picked up,” Gavin said. “Some hideous fur-lined coat. Didn’t wear a shirt under it. The most atrocious thing to happen to fashion since Jeremy.”

Geoff laughed and steadied the paintbrush against Gavin’s skin. “I find it hard to believe there was worse out there than Jeremy.”

“Oh, don’t get me started on _you_ ,” Gavin said, “you were the worst of them all.”

“Me?! What did I do?”

“You got ‘milkshake’ tattooed under your nipples.”

“ _No_ ,” Geoff gasped, but suddenly looked thoughtful.

“ _Don’t you dare_ ,” Gavin said, but Geoff hushed him by painting a white line over his lips and down to his chin.

“Shhh… keep still. Mouth shut.” Geoff said. “And thank you for not having a beard. That helps immensely.”

“Hrrrngh.”

“Yep.”

Satisfied with the white that now looped over Gavin’s eyes and down the centre of his face, Geoff started on the black.

He held the paintbrush over Gavin’s nose and hesitated.

Was there… part of the design was on his nose, wasn’t it? He remembered there was a pair of dramatic eyebrows, and the whole thing had a sweeping black outline, but the details towards the middle… Geoff couldn’t remember. For the life of him he couldn’t recall any more detail.

But that didn’t make any sense. He must’ve seen the design a hundred times, and he’d even touched the pattern up himself when out working with Ryan. Ryan’s face swam in front of his vision; almond shaped face, crooked nose, sharp eyes, thin upper lip. A hundred moments accompanied them. Ryan, taking the paint off in the bathroom, laughing at something Jack said. Gavin smudging it on purpose, Jeremy applying it when Ryan fractured his thumb, Michael’s endless jokes.

Nothing made the paint’s design any clearer.

Geoff painted the eyebrows and the outline and then put the paintbrush down.

“That’s it,” Geoff said, “it’s done.”

Gavin pulled his phone out and inspected the design.

“Simple, but still terrifying.” Gavin said. He picked up the paintbrush. “Now I’d better check I’ve got the design down pat.”

Geoff lunged for the paintbrush but this time Gavin was faster.

Geoff took the paint tubes instead.

Gavin pouted.

“Absolutely not,” Geoff said. “You a hundred percent would draw a dick on my face.”

“It’s not _certain_ I would,” Gavin argued. “There was a chance you could’ve ended up with some cool skull face paint.”

“And that chance was zero percent.”

“Nah, if I could or couldn’t’ve, that means it was a fifty-fifty chance.”

Geoff held his index finger and thumb about a centimetre apart, a smile on his face. “I am _this_ close to hitting you.”

“Try it, old man,” Gavin flashed a grin at him, “I can take you.”

Geoff almost stood up to show Gavin he still had a trick or two up his sleeve. Almost, so close that he moved in his seat to stand. But he couldn’t. This wasn’t his Gavin. This wasn’t where Gavin was supposed to live, this wasn’t his city, and that wasn’t Ryan’s design on Gavin’s face. In an instant Geoff was desperate to get back to somewhere he recognised, where he wouldn’t feel like an intruder looking in on his own life.

“No, I…” Geoff trailed off. “I think It’s about time I moved on.”

“No please Geoff, don’t. Please.” Gavin pleaded, and it felt like the temperature in Gavin’s living room dropped to nothing. “Not yet, please.”

“I shouldn’t stay, Gavin. The longer I stay, the harder it’ll be to leave.”

“Then… one more walk. Please, just one more walk with you.” Gavin begged. “Look, the storm’s stopping. Let me clean this off my face and we’ll have a proper goodbye. Please?”

Geoff froze for half a second before relenting. “Okay, Gav. One last walk together.”

  


* * *

  


Of course they’d ended up back at the pier. The storm had just ended and the ground was still saturated. A light rain drifted down, keeping it that way, so the puddles were still prominent enough to pick up the dazzling array of colours coming from the sky. The dark blues from the spotty cloud coverage intermingled with all the yellows and oranges and reds until half the sky was pink and purple. Even as Geoff watched, the sharper and brighter colours highlighting the bottom of the clouds faded away into something a little cooler and more mellow as the Earth rotated away from the Sun.

It was a shame they hadn’t managed to get down here before the sun disappeared behind the horizon. Because who was Geoff fooling. The pier at sunset was his favourite, to hell with any people around. But the rain earlier had cleared most of them away, and if it wasn’t for the burger shop’s owner hanging her fairy lights out on the railings, they’d have the whole thing to themselves.

They stopped walking once they hit the end of the pier. Their hands fell apart and Geoff took a step back.

“Is this where we’re gonna have to say goodbye?” Gavin asked.

Geoff nodded.

But he couldn't. Not with Gavin looking at him like that, like he was the last good thing left in the world. He recognised it, having seen it on his own Gavin’s face. Geoff’s face crumpled, his brows creased together, lips turned down and scrunched up. There was very little Geoff had left to hold together, but he made a determined effort. No use falling apart here and now.

It wouldn't be fair to leave him here, looking so forlorn.

It wasn’t fair.

How could this Gavin really be any different from his own? Did it even matter if he were? After all, the Gavin Geoff will return to would be different. He'd have months worth of new memories. Forgotten some stuff, learned some new things. Most of the cells in his body would be different. All the atoms, except most of his brain. Everything else was eternally replaced. How different did that make him from the Gavin standing before Geoff, eyes wide and choking with tears? What right did he claim to say one Gavin was worth more happiness than another?

But what else could he do? Couldn’t take him with him, didn’t want to leave him here. But what other choice did he have?

“But I can’t just leave you here,” Geoff said, “I can’t. I just can’t. It’s not fair at all. When I sort everything out, as soon as I can, I’m coming back. I promise.”

Geoff fumbled at his right wrist for a few moments. He pulled his watch off and handed it to Gavin, who took it mutely.

“This is something my Fakes gave to me a couple of years back. It contains one of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned. Flip it over, would you.”

Gavin did, and revealed the text carved in neat calligraphy: _Make Mistakes_.

“I’ve made some pretty big ones, over the years.” Geoff continued. “But my crew forgave me. And if your crew was anything like mine…”

Gavin was crying in earnest now, so Geoff bundled him up in a hug. Breathed in his hair, his conditioner, Jack's cologne. He knew it was the last he'd experience of it for a while. Scratched at the back of Gavin's neck, engulfed him as much as he was able to. Gavin let him, and they rocked gently together for an indeterminate amount of time, swaying in time with the ocean's waves. 

But even Geoff could see the tide retreating.

“Time for you to move on, I think.” Gavin said eventually. It was little more than a whisper, and almost snatched away by the waves.

“I thought you’d be begging me to stay,” Geoff replied.

“Was going to,” Gavin sniffed, “I spent all day thinking about the perfect thing to say, to get you to. Even if it were just for another day. But... that's not what you need. I get it, I really do. So I'm not going to selfishly make that harder for you.”

“I appreciate it.” Geoff poked the watch in Gavin’s hand. “Keep it. Think of it as like insurance, in a way.”

“I’ll keep it until you come back.”

“Now I have to, don’t I?”

Together they shared a small laugh.

“How will you find me again?” Gavin asked.

Geoff looked out over the ocean, thinking.

“Back in my universe, there was a piece of alien tech that could track things, as long as they didn’t change too much. I think it had something to do with wavelengths, mass wavelengths or something. If I had the helmet, I bet I could get it to track… I don’t know. We’d need two of whatever it was. One for me and one for you.”

“I have an idea.” Gavin pulled a thin tube out of his pocket and took it apart.

“Laser pointer battery,” Gavin explained, and handed it over.

“I don’t get it.” Geoff said.

“I read this theory once online,” Gavin said, “about electrons. That they’re all actually the same one, just jumping around in time and space. You keep that battery, and we’ll both have that same electron on us. That should work, right?”

“If it’s true, I don’t see why not.”

Gavin slid the watch over his wrist and fastened it.

“You’ve given me so much these last two days,” Gavin said, “more than I ever thought I was ever going to get again. Even if it doesn’t work out, and you can’t come back. It was worth it just seeing you again. 

“Can I… ask for one more thing from you?”

Gavin leaned in, asking without words.

Geoff hesitated for a moment, then joined him in the middle.

The kiss was chaste and lasted all of two seconds. Just long enough to linger and for Geoff’s mouth to warm with Gavin’s breath, the air tickling through his short beard hair.

Gavin blinked away a couple more tears.

“Don’t keep me waiting too long, you hear?”

Geoff nodded.

Gavin turned around and made his way back down the pier, taking care to avoid the worst of the puddles. He didn’t look back.

Geoff stared down at the hypercube, glowing bright on his wrist.

“This next universe better start with another grave,” Geoff told the device, “because if it doesn’t, and I left him here for no reason, I’m gonna figure out who’s making the calls and I’m gonna rip your heart out. See how you like it.”

It didn’t.


End file.
